A STEPSON OF 



HENRY MURRAY 



> 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 




Photo. 



Elliott- ami Fry. 



HENRY MURRAY, 



A STEPSON OF 
FORTUNE 



THE MEMORIES, CONFESSIONS, AND OPINIONS 

OF 

HENRY MURRAY 



" All, the plain saw me gather, I garland — 
The flowers and the weeds." 

Browning. 



THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 

NEW YORK 

1910 



f? 









TO 

MY WIFE— 

IN FAME, MEA TABERNA, 
IN NOCTE, MEA LUCERNA, 
RECTA ME SEMPER GUBERNA— 

I DEDICATE THIS IMPERFECT RECORD 
OF A MOST IMPERFECT LIFE 



London ; March, igog. 



^ 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



Nathaniel Hawthorne prefaced one of his earlier 
volumes by the statement that it was the work of 
the obscurest man of letters in America. I will 
preface this volume by saying that it is the work 
of the unluckiest scribbler — regarded merely as a 
scribbler — on which the all-beholding eye of day 
has ever looked. That is the one statement this 
book will contain to which I will suffer no challenge. 
It is my one point of pride — perhaps, of vanity — on 
which I would quarrel with my dearest friend or the 
wife of my bosom. You and I will come to no good 
of each other's society unless that fact is accepted 
as a fact. 

Many quite intelligent people will tell us that 
there is no such factor as luck in human affairs, 
and a scientist of very distinguished ability. Lord 
Avebury, once wrote a whole book to prove that 
belief the correct one. I have not read the book, 
but I am quite certain that his lordship might have 
put his ink to better uses. So far from there 
being no such force in human affairs as luck, it is 
an absolute fact that luck is the one force that 
directs them. Since a man does not choose the 
race he shall be born of, it is a matter of luck 
whether he comes into the world a white man or 
a nigger. Since he does not select his parents it 

B 



2 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

is luck whether his father is a duke or a dustman, 
and whether he is the product of well-fed, well- 
aerated, healthy people, or of the refuse of humanity, 
rotten with accumulations of inherited disease. It 
is luck whether he is born with the intellectual 
equipment which makes the man of genius or the 
absolute lack of such equipment, which makes the 
microcephalous idiot. It is luck whether, being a 
man of genius, he is born in circumstances which 
will encourage, or even permit, the development of 
his genius, whether, to start with, he is, or is not, 
taught to read and write. That superior intelligence 
will make itself obvious in some direction or other 
is pretty certain, but it is luck which decides the 
direction. The circumstances of their birth and 
training made Shakespeare a great poet and Raffael 
a great painter. Born in and surrounded by other 
circumstances they might have been highly adroit 
pickpockets or burglars. When the chance of 
administering his famous " whiff of grapeshot " came 
to Napoleon, he was bargaining for the purchase of 
a furniture shop in the Rue St. Honore ; had the 
chance not come, the conqueror of Europe might 
have made a successful tradesman and an excellent 
Maire of Paris, and have long since been forgotten. 
In all his battles he was only twice slightly wounded, 
but where is our certainty that, while he kept his 
legs, men as able as he did not leave their bones 
under the waters of the Beresina or the sands of 
Syria ? Looking on the prodigious prodigal waste of 
Nature, remembering that — 

" Of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear," 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 3 

and that she has no more care for the individual 
human than for the individual herb or insect, what 
surety can we have that she has not flung as rubbish 
to the void treasures of potential genius a thousand 
times as great as those she has suffered to reveal 
themselves ? 

I will produce the proofs of the vainglorious 
assertion made above in their proper place and time. 
Meanwhile, let me begin my autobiography in 
correct fashion — at the beginning. 

I do not willingly approach the history of my 
childhood, nor shall I dwell long upon it. For many 
years past it has been my habit, when any childish 
memory has intruded itself upon my mind, to 
dismiss the entire period and all connected with it 
with the heartiest curse in my repertory, and make 
haste to think of something else. From this the 
reader will conclude that my childhood was not a 
happy time, and he will be right in so concluding. 
But it is only of late years that I have come to 
recognise how unhappy it really was. 

I am the youngest born of a family of twelve or 
thirteen — I don't really know which, and it doesn't 
greatly matter. Now, to be the Benjamin of a big 
family is popularly supposed to be an enviable lot. 
So, in given circumstances, it may be, but such 
circumstances were not those into which I was 
born. My parents were getting elderly, my father 
was then fifty-seven, and my mother some years 
younger, and they had reached those ages through 
a long and dreary pilgrimage of failure and poverty 
which had soured their tempers and embittered 



4 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

their natures. In common justice to their 
memories I must make the admission that I am the 
only one of their surviving children who does not 
remember them with affection and respect. Whether 
or not, at about the period of my birth, the family 
circumstances had undergone some peculiar change 
for the worse I do not know enough of the family 
history to say. But the fact as I know it is, that 
when I made my appearance, whatever may have 
been the condition of the real, objective larder, the 
spiritual cupboard from which the spiritual milk and 
bread had been — I suppose — copiously administered 
to my brothers and sisters, was bare. I do not 
remember any time of my childhood when a sense 
of wrong, oppression, and injustice was not a part 
of my being. I do not know what age I may have 
had when it became a determined and indisputable 
dogma with my parents that I was an altogether 
lost and abandoned criminal, but I do know that 
that was the hypothesis on which they acted 
towards me. I do not remember that, on the occa- 
sion of any one of those innumerable little squabbles 
which inevitably happen among all children, an 
appeal to parental authority ever resulted in any- 
thing but my getting the worst of it, and pretty 
generally a hiding into the bargain. On one occa- 
sion, my father being in a brown study, and I sitting 
reading beside him, a plate fell off a shelf, and my 
father eave me a cuff on the side of the head which 
left me stunned and dazed for an hour after. The 
proceeding looks perhaps a little arbitrary and 
illogical, but it was really beautifully simple. My 
father was annoyed, he did not pause to inquire 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 5 

into the nature of the annoyance, I, the incarnate 
principle of evil, being there in actual presence 
beside him, must have caused the annoyance. Thus 
we see that what we are rashly apt to call illogicality 
is often really our ignorance of the premisses of the 
case and of our neighbour's mental process. Also, 
it must be remembered that my father was a 
Scotsman and a Calvinist, and therefore had a fixed 
belief in the efficacy of pain as a panacea for all 
moral disease. He would have scorned mercy to a 
peccant child as the most contemptible of all forms 
of moral cowardice. Of the two, to administer a 
severe beating to a child for a fault he had not 
committed would have been to him a much smaller 
injustice than to have spared the same child a 
thrashing for an offence of which he was really 
guilty. Of the latter crime I can conscientiously 
exonerate him. 

It is, I have remarked, a common thing for the 
female members of a family not merely to imitate, 
but to exaggerate to the verge of caricature, any 
moral kink displayed by the head of the family. 
My father holding that I was possessed of a legion 
of devils only to be held in check by frequent 
castigation, my mother and my two younger sisters, 
a few years my seniors, quite naturally became 
imbued with the same belief. My mother had been 
bred in the tenets of the Church of England, but in 
marrying my father she had espoused his form of 
faith, and found herself quite at home in it. She 
was a born scold and tyrant, and to a temperament 
of that kind it must be a soul-satisfying joy to 
discover a religion which sanctions its prevailing 



6 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

attributes, and sanctifies what was merely a luxurious 
indulgence into a sacred duty. Since every child 
born into the world is a bundle of original sin, since 
its every desire and appetite is prompted of the devil, 
it is the plain duty of the Christian parent to mortify 
those desires and appetites, and to curb and correct 
the lusts which persuade unto damnation. So, as, 
in common with every other normal child that ever 
lived or will live, I loathed fat and loved sugar, I was 
stinted of sugar and stuffed with fat — to the manifest 
improvement of both my health and my temper. 
If I showed symptoms of particular liveliness of an 
evening my mother dispatched me to bed ; if I was 
too tired to hold my eyes open she kept me up an 
hour or two after my usual time. By feigning 
extreme weariness of any occupation I liked or of 
any book which interested me I could always extract 
from her a prompt order to go on with it, and such 
pretences were common resorts of mine — to the 
obvious advantage of my morals. I loved to draw, 
and had some slight natural talent in that direction. 
Sunday being the only day on which I got a real 
chance to follow that pursuit, my mother issued a 
ukase that drawing on that day was sinful. To 
show the least interest or amusement over any book 
on that day was to have it straightway confiscated — 
which, of course, greatly fortified my respect and 
affection for the Sabbath. I never knew her 
religion to inspire her to walk a mile or to spend 
a sixpence for the relief or comfort of any living 
being, but it was a most efficient and adaptable 
instrument for the annoyance of everybody about 
her. And this, I have been led to believe by 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 7 

such knowledge of history as I possess and such 
scrutiny of my neighbours as I have been able 
to make, is true of most that passes by the name 
of religion. It is like the lost articles one sees 
advertised in the newspapers, "of no use to any- 
body but the owner." My sisters were remarkable 
for their early piety, and that piety, in relation to 
myself, took the form of what I considered, and 
still consider, an over- weening fear that my mother's 
righteous wrath, but for their constant aid and 
encouragement, might cool towards me, and I 
should consequently be less frequently flogged than 
was good for me. Their method of obviating that 
disastrous consummation was simple in the extreme. 
They had only to allege some cause of complaint 
against me, and there was not the least need for them 
to strain their powers of invention either — any little 
thing would do. Though, for the matter of that, 
they might have outsoared Baron Munchausen in 
the ether of romance at my expense, and have 
accused me of stealing the sun out of heaven, so 
long as they laid their complaint before my mother. 
For me to be accused before her tribunal was to be 
condemned — and thrashed. Indeed, so eager was 
she for my moral regeneration that I can remember 
many occasions on which she did not even wait to 
hear the charge against me. My sisters invariably 
prefaced their accusations with the chastely 
euphemistic formula : '* Mother, I wish you'd speak 
to Harry." So adjured, my parent never failed to 
speak, and though her utterance was mostly confined 
to pantomime I never failed to understand it. I 
entertain a fixed conviction that if the filthiest tramp 



8 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

on the highroad had met my mother on any day of 
the year, and had accused me of any conceivable 
offence, she would have made a bee-line for me and 
have flogged me without one single word of inquiry. 
My father did occasionally institute some preliminary 
inquisition before proceeding to execution — my 
mother never. That I could be innocent of any 
offence laid to my charge was to her unthinkable. 
On one occasion she discovered that a big earthen 
vessel, covered inside with blue glaze, and locally 
known as a "jowl," part of the baking outfit of the 
house, had been broken. The slavey of the period, 
a dirty, snivelling little trull from the local work- 
house, accused me of having broken it, and gave a 
circumstantial account, every word of which was 
a lie, of how I had done it. I denied the charge, 
quite vainly, and received at my mother's hands one 
of the severest floggings I ever had. She was a 
devout Christian, and I remember one day hearing 
her inveigh with great eloquence about the wicked- 
ness of some " atheist " who denied the existence of 
Hell. I sincerely hope — as I sincerely believe — that 
the atheist was right. For, if the Eternal Judgment 
Bar is a reality, the most friendly and kindly witness 
will find it quite in vain to attempt any mercifully 
intended perjury before that all-knowing Tribunal, 
and I shall have to speak the truth there that I have 
written here. In that consideration I write " R.I.P." 
on my mother's tombstone with a full heart. 

Since, during childhood and early youth, a boy's 
mother and sisters are, as a rule, the only specimens 
of womanhood of which he has opportunity of 
intimate study, his ideas of them will inevitably 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 9 

colour his view of their sex. It was not the least 
abominable influence upon my character of that 
Temple of Naggery and House of Children's Tears, 
my early " home," that when I arrived at puberty 
the philosophical problem which most exercised my 
young intelligence was why God had created women. 
The period of the awakening of sex brought me 
the solution of that problem, and made my views of 
women a mixture of contempt for their hearts and 
brains with a crude desire of the physical pleasure 
they are capable of affording — a radically debasing 
conception which for years coloured my life, and has 
left indelible stains on my individuality. 

Before passing to a justification — so sorely 
needed — of this sordid narrative, let me pay here a 
debt of gratitude to certain influences without which 
my childhood would have been more wretched 
even than it was. My sister Mary, the eldest of 
the family, was invariably kind, patient, and sisterly, 
and her marriage when I was ten years of age, 
necessitating her leaving home, was an unfortunate 
business for me. Two visits I paid her at her new 
home in Liverpool are among the few really bright 
spots of my early life, and her death two years 
ago, in pain and poverty as undeserved as they 
were bravely and sweetly borne, is a grief yet 
unassuaged. Of my brother Christie I shall speak 
in his place. Of two other brothers still living I 
remember nothing that was not kindly, and many 
acts and words of true affection. 

If what I have hitherto had to say concerning 
my father has given a purely unpleasant idea of his 
personality the fault is none of mine, but such an 



10 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

impression, left uncorrected, would be none the less 
a grave injustice to his memory. He was indubit- 
ably a good man, and the errors — which were 
nothing less in my view than frightful — of his treat- 
ment of me as a child do not blind me to his merits. 
He had fine qualities. He was far and away the 
honestest man I have ever met — " of an incorrigible 
and losing honesty," in Charles Lamb's phrase. 
He is the one man I have ever known of whom I 
can say that I do not believe that he ever told a lie 
in his life. I simply cannot imagine him paltering 
with the truth, and he had the instinctive moral 
purity of the finest type of woman, which shrinks 
from any foulness of thought as the ermine from 
a physical defilement. And, incongruous as the 
declaration may seem with what I have already 
written regarding him, he was emphatically just in 
intention. The one serious flaw in a character 
otherwise intrinsically noble was his contempt of the 
softer emotions, and that I believe to have been less 
an innate quality than the outcome of that filthy 
and abominable blasphemy against human nature, 
the Calvinist creed in which he had been bred. I 
cannot fancy that he had ever, even to my eldest 
brothers and sisters, been of the soft or doting type 
of parent. He had been stern even to the children 
who came to him in the first flush of hopeful man- 
hood and wedded happiness, and if a man is stern 
with his first children, what is he likely to be to 
those who come after the exercise of twenty years 
of unchecked severity have indurated his contempt 
for childish suffering ? Christie is remembered to 
this day among his contemporaries as ** Tiger " 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 11 

Murray, from the variegated appearance his skin 
never failed to present when stripped for bathing. 
The instrument of domestic torture in his day was 
the Scottish "tawse," a broad leathern thong like 
the window-strap of a third-class carriage, cut into 
fingers at one end, and toughened in the fire. This 
delectable apparatus had, in my time, given place 
to the cane. Which of the two is the most efficient 
pain-producer I do not know, never having sampled 
the " tawse," but the cane is, as Christopher Sly 
might say, "a good commonty." My father was 
wont to preface his severer executions with a 
formula to the effect that it hurt him as much to 
inflict the punishment as it hurt me to receive it. 
Twenty years earlier the statement had probably 
been true, but in my day it was nothing more and 
nothinof less than an obvious catchword, which 
simply added insult of my infant discernment to 
the physical injury of the hiding, and I heartily 
wish nowadays that I had found the pluck to tell 
him so. 

I find no pleasure in writing these things, and 
cannot conceive the human creature who could find 
pleasure in reading them, but I justify the record by 
the warning it enables me to offer to such of my 
readers as may happen to be parents. Beware how 
you let the devil of wrath against your child enter 
your heart. There is no vice more insidious, none 
of rapider growth, none more deadly, than the 
cruelty which believes itself to be based on duty — 
see the religious history of the world, passim. I 
write it deliberately, as the best thought I have to 
offer you, that to beat a little child is a cowardly 



12 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

and inhuman crime, which no offence of which that 
child could by any possibility be guilty could justify. 
It brutalises and degrades you in the exact ratio in 
which it wounds the innate dignity of the child. I 
am no humanitarian crank. I have met more than 
one unendurable bounder who, had he received 
a solid, scientifically administered kicking at the 
psychological moment — say, on his twenty-first 
birthday — might have been improved by it into a 
passable imitation of a gentleman. I know quite 
well what to think of the man who lays his hand 
upon a woman, save etcetera, but I know also 
specimens of that truly awful creature, the cad in 
petticoats, who might be converted into quite 
decent women by the stern medicament of a sound 
thrashing. I regard the abolition of the Prize 
Ring as a national misfortune, and I am so far 
from deprecating the use of the cat in cases of 
cowardly violence that I would gladly apply it with 
my own hand. But I would no more think of 
beating a small child than I would of burning him, 
and I do not desire the acquaintance of any man 
capable of an act at once so brutal and so stupid. 

That my father was capable of such cruel folly 
is merely the strangest of the many paradoxes of 
which his nature was composed. Since I formed 
the intention of writing this book I have passed 
many hours in reviewing my memories and im- 
pressions regarding him, and in trying to arrive at 
some literary formula by which I might make him 
intelligible to my readers — "to sum him up to 
a satisfactory total," in Dickens's phrase. I quite 
despair of accomplishing such a task. I can but set 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 13 

on my paper a lot of dots and dashes to serve for 
the lineaments of a personality, striking in nearly 
all respects, in many, admirable ; in some, genuinely 
lovable. To children who were not his own, and 
towards whom consequently his natural sentiments 
were unwarped by that foolishly twisted sense of 
duty inculcated by his Calvinist upbringing, he was 
gentleness and beneficence incarnate. He loved 
animals, and had that intuitive understanding of 
their mental processes which I have always found 
to be one of the traits most distinctive of a really 
fine nature. His love of cats amounted to a passion, 
and the attractive power he exercised over them 
was almost uncanny. I have seen him returning 
from a morning walk followed by a perfect pro- 
cession of the creatures. Yet he would flog his 
own child till he drew blood on the strength of an 
unfavourable report from his schoolmaster ! This 
curious topsyturviness ran through his entire nature. 
He was a furious radical in politics, and his radi- 
calism was the direct outcome of a strong personal 
pride and an overweening sense of personal dignity 
— he would have met the Kaiser face to face with 
an unshrinking sense of absolute personal equality. 
Few can have been the people he had known so 
ill-advised as ever to have attempted to take the 
smallest personal liberty with him, and fear of any 
sort was a sensation I am quite certain he had never 
known. Yet he inculcated servility and cowardice 
in his children : insisted on them : and as bitterly 
resented any token of independence or assertion of 
equality in them as he would have repudiated an 
insult to himself. On one occasion I was present 



14 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

when an old friend of the family repeated the 
encomiums passed on one of my elder brothers by 
his employer, a man in a large way of business in 
the town. "If the boy goes on as he is going now," 
said the friend, " I shouldn't be surprised if the old 
man were to take him on as a partner one of these 
fine days." I have seldom seen my father so 
violently angry. '' Hoots, man ! " he barked. " I'll 
just thank ye to put none o' that kind o' rubbish in 
the head o' a son o' mine, unsettling the boy and 
giving him ridiculous ideas of his own importance. 
The lad'll just do his wark and take his wages, and 
there an end." Had there been anything of the 
domestic bully about him this attitude would have 
been readily understandable, but that explanation 
is impossible — his was a nature quite infinitely 
removed from any such pettiness. His social con- 
ception was absolutely static, completely that of 
the catechism which teaches us to do our duty in 
that state of life into which it has pleased God 
to call us. He had been poorly born and Spar- 
tanly bred in that atmosphere of close, hard, self- 
respecting, utterly unambitious Scottish poverty 
which the average Englishman can scarcely con- 
ceive. He had kept his stern honesty and tetchy 
independence intact through it all — why could not 
his children be content to do the same ? With as 
good natural brains as any but the very ablest men 
I have ever met, and with a literary culture really 
remarkable considering the straitened circumstances 
in which his life had been passed, he would have 
repudiated as a suggestion of the devil the idea 
of bettering his own condition or of lifting his 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 15 

children a rung higher on the social ladder. To 
cherish the social outlook of a pauper a little over 
the actual workhouse-grade, to marry another pauper, 
and to beget a baker's dozen of equally poor-spirited 
contributions to the ensuing generation, was the 
entire Science of Life as taught to his own children 
by the most fiercely and fearlessly independent 
man I have ever known. I shall never forget 
what a vivid flash of light fell on my father's 
personality — and on many other things — when I first 
read the agonised cry of Browning's Paracelsus — 

"God's children! 
And yet He takes no pride in us — none, none ! " 

What the God of the Calvinist is to those who 
believe in Him, that my father was to me. 

I have spoken of his literary ability. He was 
content to let it rust almost entirely, and for many 
years never put pen to paper save to write a business 
letter ; yet at near seventy years of age he could 
produce such verse as the following, which is all 
I can remember hearing him read of a rhymed 
letter to an old schoolfellow in Scotland to whom 
he anticipated making a visit : — 

" Friend o' my youth, my auldest crony ! 
My benison be on ye, Johnnie ! 
Your honest pow was black and bonnie 

When first we met : 
But noo your lyart cockernoney 

Has tint the jet, 
***** 
' Queer pliskies, whiles, my fancy plays 
In thinkin' o' the lang-gone days 



16 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

When we gaed brattlin' ower the braes 

At oor auld callin', 
Makin' and mendin' farmers' claes 

In mony a dwallin'. 

' We vverena braw in Sunday claes, 
And whiles the stanes wad hurt oor taes, 
And little fruit but hips and haes 

Fell till i oor share; 
Yet we were rich in mony ways 

And had nae care. 
* * * * * 

" noo and then 

The thrifty wife wad ask us ben, 
To hae a game at catch-the-ten,* 

Or hear a sang, 
Or whiles the fiddle spak\ and then 

Nae nicht seemed lang. 
***** 
*' And noo we're dune wi' youthfu' capers, 
We still enjoy oor bulks and papers. 
And wise men's thoughts, like weel-trimmed tapers, 

Can cheer the way, 
And light us on thro' mists and vapours 

To endless day. 

•' My willyard thochts gang yon and hither — 
But I maun end this rhymin' blether — 
We'll hae a crack wi' ane anither 

When there's nae hurry. 
For ye hae lang been like a brither 

To auld Will Murray." 

That, it seems to me, is not bad verse for an un- 
practised amateur who had not attempted to pen a 
stanza for more than the length of an average 
human life. 

* Scottish whist. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 17 

My father's literary tastes were oddly circum- 
scribed, the gods of his youth held sway in his 
heart to the end. English poetry had died with 
Byron. For Tennyson he had a half-contemptuous 
toleration ; Browning and Mrs. Browning he dis- 
missed as scribblers of obscure and pretentious 
rubbish ; Mr. Swinburne he whole-heartedly con- 
temned and abhorred as "a jingling, lustful, seducer 
of youth." Dickens he loved with the love of 
his generation, the generation which had waited 
eagerly from month to month for the shilling 
numbers of " Pickwick." 

The one real passion of his life was chess, which 
he played sufficiently well to establish himself as 
champion over a pretty wide local area. He had 
taught my elder brothers to play, but as they grew 
up and went out into the world he found himself 
without a playmate. With something of an heroic 
sense of self-sacrifice — for I loathe the so-called 
" game " as heartily as Mrs. Sarah Battle herself — 
I offered to supply their place, but the offer was 
declined on altruistic grounds. He would not, he 
said, do me so ill a turn ; adding that, had he other- 
wise employed the hours he had wasted over the 
board, he might have made himself an excellent 
linguist and a first-class mathematician. 

To complete these inchoate and scrambling 
jottings, which are the best substitute for a portrait 
my poor skill can furnish, I should add that for 
years before I was born and to the day of his 
death my father probably never passed a waking 
hour quite free from pain. He was a martyr to a 
peculiarly virulent form of asthma. He suffered, 

c 



18 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

too, from hernia, acquired by a vain effort to save 
from death an unfortunate young fellow who, 
maddened by an unjust accusation of theft, had 
hanged himself. The strain of lowering the body 
to the ground had ruptured him severely, and his 
paroxysmal cough frequently shook the intestine 
out of place. He bore his physical inflictions with 
a really splendid courage, never himself referring to 
them, and showing marked impatience of any 
proffered sympathy. I have heard of natures 
which seem to be sweetened by incessant pain, and 
for all I know to the contrary such natures may 
veritably exist, but my father's was not of them, and 
much testiness and irritability must be pardoned to 
a man so sorely plagued. 

I cannot believe, nor do I think it probable that 
my reader will very strongly disagree with my 
views in this respect, that such a regimen as my 
father's, administered by such a man as he, was 
quite the best possible. I have had occasion, like 
most other people, now and then to smile over that 
insanity of paternal pride which converts a dullard 
into a genius, and a goose of a rather poor breed 
into a swan of impossible perfection, but such an 
error is not merely more comforting to its object 
than that opposed error from which I suffered, it is 
vastly better for the moral being of both parent and 
child, and especially for the latter. I am with 
Alfred de Musset in this matter — " C'est toujours 
mon avis de gater les enfants " — and I hold it far 
better to spoil the child than to spoil the rod 
by over-use. A happy childhood is not merely in 
itself a beautiful thing, its memory is an abiding 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 19 

possession, a jewel of great price, which any subse- 
quent cruelty the world may wreak upon us can only 
burnish to a brighter lustre. Friends, make friends 
of your children. Where else than in a child's 
heart shall you look for so pure and passionate a 
love ? Remember that the day will inevitably 
come when the lisping babe whose character and 
fate are in your hands as the clay of the potter will 
deliver the final and irrevocable judgment which 
will set you on the right hand or the left, among 
the sheep or with the goats. So long as your 
children live, you will live, no breach of that 
spiritual continuity is possible. I am growing grey, 
and a few years will bend my head to the earth 
wherein my parents have been lying so long, but to 
me they are living presences, and I shall tread to 
the end the path in which they set my feet. I 
remember that moment in my early manhood when 
my father said to me that he hoped I should give 
him my confidence, should regard him as my closest 
friend, a present help in trouble. " Is it not a little 
late for that ? " I asked ; and I can yet see the 
stricken look upon the sad old face, and wish with 
all my heart that the words, just as they were, had 
gone unspoken. Though, perhaps, they helped to 
clear the atmosphere between us, and to establish 
a basis for such reconciliation as was possible. 
Certainly, we were better friends during the last 
five years I spent with him than ever before. My 
mother died when I was fifteen, and approximately 
at about the same time, my sisters went their 
respective ways into the world, and he and I being 
left together with no third person to blow the coal 



20 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

of dissension between us, the fire died down, and 
we arrived at least at toleration of each other. 

That my father was essentially a good man was 
proved, to my thinking, by the fashion in which he 
died. Feeling, on the morning of his last day of 
life, that the final summons was near at hand, he 
insisted on being taken out of bed and completely 
dressed. One of his earliest acquaintances had 
been an old blind piper, one Donald MacEchran, 
who was piloted about the countryside by a dog. 
My father, in a boyish prank, had stolen the dog, 
and the old man had uttered the grim prophecy, 
" Wully Murray, ye'll die in your boots " — meaning 
thereby, of course, that he would come to be 
hanged. " If all tales are true," remarked my 
father, " auld Donald and I will have a laugh ower 
that or the day be out." A man who could affront 
death with so serene a courage must have been a 
good man. Whatever his errors, he had certainly 
never gravely sinned against his own interior light. 
My father's end was peace. Peace be with him. 

Perhaps the habit, recently alluded to, and for 
many years carefully cultivated, of banishing the 
period of childhood from my mind, has resulted in 
obliterating many memories I might otherwise 
have clearly retained. I remember certain insig- 
nificant incidents wuth an almost startling clearness, 
but the general impression is blurred and in- 
decipherable. I can recall with photographic dis- 
tinctness what must have been one of my earliest 
attempts to walk. I see myself and the attendant 
details as in a picture. I am clad in a tartan frock 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 21 

of red and black stripes, and a grey cloth jacket 
ornamented with black velvet, I wear a '' pork-pie " 
hat decorated with a red feather, and shining shoes 
fastened round the ankle by leathern straps fixed by 
buttons of blue glass. I am voyaging, very un- 
steadily, across the hearthrug between the extended 
arms of my sister Mary and my father. The latter 
is dressed in grey tweed, he has a newspaper 
doubled over his right knee, and his spectacles 
are pushed up over his forehead among his bushy, 
opinionated-looking shock of grey hair. As I can 
see the flames of a fire brilliantly reflected in his 
glasses I conclude that the incident takes place on 
a winter afternoon. 

Another little scene, sharply defined as an 
etching. I am sitting in a tub of warm water, by 
the side of the kitchen fire. Behind me, ticking 
solemnly, is an old eight-day grandfather's clock. 
Seated beside the table under the window, smoking 
a big curved wooden pipe with a bright metal 
cover, is my sailor-brother, John, who died when 
I was three. I am blowing the soap-bubbles off 
my lips into the face of my sister Mary, who kneels 
beside me swathed from chin to knees in a coarse 
herden apron, and with bare soapy arms, and 
laughing as she tries to evade them. It is Saturday 
night, though how I know that I should be puzzled 
now to say. But I do know it perfectly well, and 
also that it is market-night, and that the long street 
outside, its blackness broken by shop-window lights 
and flaring naphtha-lamps on hucksters' stalls, is 
thronged with people, for whom I feel a sort of 
pity as I watch the whirling snow-flakes visible 



22 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

through the window, and feel the contrast between 
the warmth and snugness about me and the raw 
discomfort out of doors. I see myself, a little 
flaxen-haired figure in a white nightgown, like a 
diminutive edition of the conventional angel, being 
carried up to bed in Mary's arms, and can catch a 
dim echo of the song she croons to me. 

It would probably be a year or two later that I 
made what I still remember as my Great Dis- 
covery. I had been left alone in the garden one 
afternoon an hour or so before my customary bed- 
time. It being rather early or rather late — I have 
forgotten which — in the year, I had not long been 
left to myself before the twilight began to close in. 
To be abroad and alone at that hour was a most 
wonderful and pride-inspiring experience, quite 
untinctured, so far as I can remember, by any fear 
of the gathering gloom. Indeed, I was so far from 
being afraid of the darkness that I conceived the 
idea of passing the entire night in the open-air, and 
to accomplish that end scaled the wall of the garden 
at its lowest height, and hid myself behind an 
outhouse in the neighbouring field. I cannot re- 
member with what sensations I watched the gradual 
dying of the light ; all feelings experienced between 
the moment of my escape from the garden and that 
in which the Great Discovery dawned upon me 
have faded from my recollection. Whatever they 
may have been they merged into a transport of 
wonder, admiration, delight, for which my pen can 
find no words, as first in single spies, and then in 
splendid, glittering battalions, the stars shone out 
upon the glooming sky. My little heart expanded 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 23 

well-nigh to bursting with some such nameless 
rapture as that which filled the breast of Cortes 
when, with eagle eye, he stared at the Pacific. 
Like Cortes at that moment ; like Franklin when 
the javelin of the lightning stabbed his silken kite ; 
like the Marquis of Worcester when the heated 
water split the shaft of his cannon ; like Newton 
when the apple rapped him on the pate ; like the 
mediaeval monk when his mixture of charcoal, 
sulphur, and saltpetre sent his pestle, his mortar, 
and himself flying triivious, I had made my Great 
Discovery. There was a favourite girl-cousin of 
mine in the house at that moment, and no delight 
she did not share was perfect. Oblivious of the 
bricks which scratched my hands and barked my 
shins, not even remembering that my appearance 
in the family circle would be the certain signal for 
my dismissal to bed, I tumbled over the wall and 
tore into the house. " Alice ! Alice ! Come and 
see what I've found ! " She came, and saw, 
and laughed ! — a laugh which, for the moment, 
stung me with a pain which even her kisses could 
not heal all at once. I had indeed made a great 
" find." I had discovered the Solar System, not in 
the piecemeal, retail fashion of Copernicus and 
Galileo, but in one lot, and with immediate complete 
possession. 

My childish self, at that supreme moment of 
wonder and delight, has become to me a standing 
simile, an ever true and faithful type, both of my 
later self and of humanity at large. I have made 
many discoveries since then, but none so big or so 
beautiful — none indeed at all closely resembling it 



24 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



except in its pathetico-ludicrous absence of origi- 
nality, and have been laughed at for proclaiming 
them. There was a moment when, in the firmament 
of my own soul, I discovered a galaxy of vivid 
splendours, stars and planets and constellations of 
idea and emotion, and summoned the world, as erst 
I had summoned Cousin Alice, to behold the glories 
I had found. And again I was laughed at — by no 
means this time for the obviousness of my discovery. 
I could have borne that well enough. No, I was 
told either that the wonders I proclaimed did not 
exist at all, or that they were at best but Jack-o'- 
Lantern exhalations of a barren and swampy in- 
telligence. Nor can gentle Cousin Alice stand as 
a type of those who derided my later discovery. 
Would that she might ! In her laughter there had 
been no malice, no sense of petty superiority in the 
destruction of a vain and foolish vision — nothing 
but the clean mirth of girlhood and the tender pity 
which even an experience so small as hers could 
feel for the illusion of a baby who counted only 
one-fifth of her brief tale of years. The world 
laughs at the innocent and pompous proclamations 
of our adult illusions, which is well ; but it palliates 
its wounding scorn with no anodyne of pity, which 
is well also, perhaps, but surely not so well. The 
disillusionments of childhood leave no final sense of 
loss ; the bubbles blown by a baby are but of soap 
and water ; but in our later years they are streaked 
and stained to beauty by our heart's blood, and the 
breaking of each in turn is something of a cataclysm. 

It is curious that, although I have no faintest 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 25 

memory of being taught my letters, I have a clear 
recollection of the shame I suffered because a little 
blue-eyed mite of a girl possessed that accomplish- 
ment, and I did not. I remember, too, producing a 
double effect on the mind of an elderly gentleman, 
a manufacturing chemist of the neighbourhood, by 
stoutly proclaiming that I could read, and proving 
the same by repeating to him by rote the words of 
a picture book of " Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," 
turning the pages accurately in the right places. I 
can see the old gentleman's amazed face, and hear 
him ejaculate, " Astonishing ! Astonishing ! " My 
father explained that I was not reading, but merely 
reciting from memory, whereon the other replied, 
" More astonishing still. My dear Murray, that 
boy will make a remarkable man." A nice old 
gentleman, but no prophet. 

From the moment at which I conquered the 
mystery of reading I did as little of anything else 
as my seniors would let me. I devoured anything 
in print that came my way, and the verbal memory 
which has always been by far the strongest of my 
faculties enabled me to store my mind with hundreds 
of passages of verse and prose the meaning of which 
only dawned on me years later. My memory, by 
the way, is in some respects curiously erratic and 
undependable. For words, and especially for words 
cast into the form of verse, I have encountered few 
which could compete with it, but for certain matters 
much more important in the everyday business of 
life it is abnormally and irritatingly bad. I have 
no memory of places, and my lack of the sense of 
locality is so complete as almost to amount to a 



26 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

positive, instead of a negative, quality. After thirty 
years of acquaintance with London, I am constantly 
amazed at finding that two given places I had 
thought to be miles apart are really close together, 
or that two neighbourhoods I had believed to be 
closely contiguous are in reality wide asunder. 
Like Mr. Kipling's camel, " I lose myself forever if 
you let me stray a mile." The most careful system 
of mnemonics and the closest study of maps have 
been powerless to remedy this defect. And figures 
are almost absolutely devoid of meaning to me. 
For many years the only date of which I was quite 
certain was that conveyed in the jingling rhyme — 

" In the year ten hundred and sixty-six 
William the Conqueror in England did fix — " 

and I could have memorised the whole of Paradise 
Lost with less trouble than it has taken me to 
supplement that slender store by the score or so 
of dates which are absolutely necessary to a 
student of history. To this day I have a sort of 
sense of personal obligation to Chaucer for having 
died in 1400, and to Charles V. and our Charles L 
for having been so obliging as to have been 
born in 1500 and 1600 respectively. On one 
occasion my schoolmaster wrote to my father 
stating that, although a good pupil in most re- 
spects and an excellent one in some, I seemed 
incapable of making the smallest improvement in 
arithmetic. My father, of course, on his invariable 
theory, set down this shortcoming to sheer per- 
versity. He presented me on the first day of the 
summer holiday with a book of tables, and gave 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 27 

me to understand that if I could not, before return- 
ing to school, repeat to him the multiplication table 
up to twelve times twelve I might prepare myself 
for painful consequences. I passed a month of 
unmitigated misery over the task, and had at last 
to confess that I knew no more about it than I had 
known at starting. My father had the justice to 
credit me with good intention. He spared me the 
threatened castigation, and wrote to the master to 
the effect that, since I should obviously never shine 
as an arithmetician, he had better let me concentrate 
on other subjects. 

It was when I was about five years of age that, 
walking one morning along Paradise Street, I was 
accosted by a grey-haired, hideous old hag of a 
woman, who hailed me as " her pretty little gentle- 
man," and asked me if I could read. On my reply- 
ing in the affirmative, she begged me, with many 
honeyed phrases, to accompany her to a house a 
few doors off, to read a letter which had come for 
her daughter that morning. I consented, and she 
led me to a two-storeyed cottage, one of a row, 
whose lower floor was approached by a descent 
by four or five steps of worn and broken brick, 
and into a room lit by a window with diamond 
panes framed in strips of lead. The walls of 
the room were almost hidden by funeral cards, 
each separately contained in a skimpy frame of 
black wood, and looking curiously out of keeping 
with one or two gaudy lithographs. Sitting at a 
little round table, with a letter in her hand, was a 
girl of about twenty years of age. At the elder 



28 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

woman's request she gave me the letter, and I 
began to read it. I remember absolutely nothing 
of its contents — I was probably too much occupied 
with the task of deciphering it to pay much atten- 
tion to its gist — but suddenly the old woman set up 
a strident howl of grief, and the girl, dropping her 
head on to the table between her extended arms, 
and writhing her body as if in an ecstasy of anguish, 
sobbed bitterly. And there the memory comes 
sharply to an edge. I do not even remember how 
I left the place. I must have passed it hundreds of 
times thereafter, but I never saw either the old or 
the young woman — either of whom I should at 
once have recognised, and whose faces I can recall 
with perfect clearness at this moment — again. Nor 
did I ever, so far as my memory goes, speak a 
word about the occurrence to any other person. 

I have another memory connected with that 
odd custom of collecting funeral cards. It is, or 
was, universal among the poorer class in the Black 
Country, and an unusually large assortment of these 
lugubrious memorials gave to its possessor some- 
thing of that aristocracy bestowed in other circles 
by a Vinegar Bible or " a Grignon with the 
Regent's crest." They were handed on as heir- 
looms from parent to child, and I have heard of 
them as items of testamentary bequest. Once, 
when taking a country walk, I sought refuge against 
a rainstorm in a solitary wayside cottage. The 
little front room, which served the family as 
kitchen, parlour, dining-room, and one member 
at least as a bedchamber, was quite papered with 
them from wainscot to ceiling. In the place of 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 29 

honour over the mantel, with a little clear space 
all round it, was one of larger size than ordinary, 
set in an incongruous gilt frame. The central 
space which accommodated the letterpress was sur- 
rounded by dropsical cherubs in filigree, hovering 
round a couple of impossibly constructed angels 
weeping into a pot-bellied funeral urn, and beneath 
the name and date of death of the person com- 
memorated were printed the following lines : — 

" When I am dead and in my grave, 

And all my bones are rotten. 

Dear mother you will think of me 

When I am quite forgotten." 

There are moments — and rather frequent moments 
too — when a dose of literary culture is a perilous 
possession, and I have seldom been nearer to 
laughing without doing it than I was at that 
moment. The quiet, decent old body, who was for 
the moment my hostess, saved me from committing 
that outrage. " Ah ! " she said, in a quavering old 
voice in which grief and pride were touchingly 
blended, "my poor George, as died in that very 
bed a year come next Saturday, maade that poetry 
out of his own yed on'y a wik afore he died, an' 
wrote it down wi' his own hand." I wonder if 
there is any passage in ^schylus or Shakespeare 
or Milton which has ever brought so much comfort 
to any stricken human heart as that bit of appalling 
doggerel brought to that poor old woman ? 

I was sent to my first school at about nine years 
of age. It was kept by two partners, one of whom 



30 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

was an excellent linguist. He disappeared some- 
what mysteriously soon after I left his control, and 
I have a dim recollection of having heard it stated 
that he served as a German spy in the war which 
broke out a year or two later, and that he had been 
caught and summarily shot by the French. The 
school was one of some pretension, and the wearing 
of a college-cap, vulgarly known as a " mortar- 
board," was enforced on the pupils. This mark of 
distinction was resented by the youthful democrats 
of the neighbourhood, and was the occasion of much 
persecution of the smaller fry of the school at their 
hands. One of them — I never knew his name, or 
anything about him — made himself peculiarly offen- 
sive to me, but I noticed that, unless he was 
accompanied by others of his own kidney, or if I 
was in the society of comrades, he was careful to 
avoid me. He was older, and considerably bigger 
and stronger than myself, but this prudence on his 
part inspired me with doubts concerning his courage, 
which, as the sequel showed, were well founded. 
I, alone, met him, solitary, one evening at the corner 
of Hargate Lane, leading off the High Street. At 
sight of him I uttered a squeal of terror, and bolted 
as if from a vision of sudden death. He followed 
me with whoops of triumph and contempt. I lured 
him to a deserted spot, and there paid off old scores 
in a fashion which made him yelp for mercy like a 
whipped puppy. I have seldom enjoyed myself 
more, and went home inflated with a great opinion 
of my merits, less as a combatant than as a 
strategist. 

I passed a couple of years at my first school, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 31 

and then, owing I suppose to a fluctuation in the 
family fortunes, was transferred to a cheaper one, 
where the college-cap was unknown. It was kept 
by a middle-aged man, the very model of a lower 
middle-class pedagogue of the old type, with that 
prim, picked, precise method of speech which is 
almost invariably the peculiarity of the man self- 
educated rather late in life. There was a belief in 
my family that he had at one time, some few years 
earlier, cherished matrimonial intentions towards 
my eldest sister, Mary. He had at all events paid 
sundry visits to our house, and, finding himself on 
one occasion alone with my sister for a few minutes, 
had suddenly inquired, after several abortive at- 
tempts at articulation, " What are your ideas 
regarding furniture, Miss Murray .'*" Mary was far 
too kind-hearted a girl willingly to have wounded 
anybody's feelings, even those of the least welcome 
wooer, but she had a rather acute sense of humour, 
and the struggle between politeness and an hyste- 
rical desire to laugh had ended in her bolting into 
the garden, leaving the question unanswered. The 
schoolmaster had never again crossed our threshold, 
but had obviously found consolation elsewhere, for 
at the time of my passing under his care he was a 
married man. 

I do not remember that at either of these 
schools I learned anything worth the knowing, and 
but for my own private reading should have entered 
life a monument of ignorance. What little I know 
— and I am painfully ignorant of much which the 
great majority of educated people take for granted 
— I have picked up in my own haphazard fashion. 



32 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

I look back on the time spent at school as, educa- 
tionally considered, so much sheer waste. Had my 
father kept me at home, let me follow my own bent 
in reading, supplied me with a good encyclopaedia, 
atlas, and etymological dictionary, and insisted on a 
thorough use of them, I should have been a vastly 
better-informed man than I can now ever hope to 
be. For most boys — perhaps for the great majority 
— a school course is the best means of education, 
but to me it was no good at all. 

In one respect my father was supremely wise. 
He let me read what I would. I shall never forget 
the wrath and amazement of my mother when, 
after perusing some pages of the " Decameron," 
she discovered my name written on the title-page. 
(I was then about twelve.) My father let her fluent 
objurgations run to an end, and made no reply, 
except to forbid her to burn the book, as she had 
proposed to do. Later on, when I was a young 
man, I recalled the incident to his mind, and 
expressed some surprise that he, so stern a moralist, 
should have winked at my study, not merely of the 
" Decameron," but of books even less decent. 

"It was best," he answered. " The evil of such 
books did not then exist for you, and they did you 
no such harm as they would do if you read them 
for the first time now, when your passions have 
awakened. And, if I had taken them from you, you 
would have read them in secret, and I did not 
choose that you should be more of a liar than 
nature had made you." Toujours poli, vous saves, 
monsieur mon pere. 

I fancy, looking back upon my school-days, that 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 33 

I must have been a rather reticent and self-centred 
sort of boy, without much capacity for the making 
of friendships. I do not remember any other boy 
who played Jonathan to my David, or Pythias to 
my Damon. Two only of my classmates stand out 
with any marked distinction in my memory. One 

was J , a curly-headed, lively, mischievous 

young demon, from whose freckled, snub-nosed face 
gaiety, pluck, and impudence radiated as light from 
a candle. I have a vivid remembrance of finding 
myself one sweltering Saturday afternoon half- 
holiday in the open country in his society, penni- 
less, choked with thirst, and with the mockery of an 
empty ginger-beer bottle in my pocket. We came 

across a cow browsing in a field, and J , always 

full of resource, hit upon what then seemed to me 
the magnificently practical idea of milking the cow 
into the bottle. The result of this experiment was 
that he got badly kicked in the stomach by the cow, 
and vindictively chased for a considerable distance 
by a yokel armed with a pitchfork. On another 
occasion it was discovered that the books and 
papers contained in the desk of an extremely un- 
popular boy who had earned a double infamy by 
playing the dual part of the sneak and bully of the 
school had been kneaded into a mass of wet clay 
which entirely filled the desk. The deed was 

clearly traced to J , whose hands and garments 

were loud in testimony against him. The master 
was already giving the cane the deadly preliminary 
switch when J was inspired to deprecate judg- 
ment by the amazing plea that "he didn't know 
there was any rule against it." The Homeric laugh 

D 



34 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

with which the statement was received I hope 
mitigated the severity of the flogging, but flogged 
he was. 

C was another boy of whom my memory 

remains pretty much intact. He was incredibly lean, 
with a face of ghastly pallor, extremely prominent 
grey eyes, and hair of a startling tint of vermilion. 
As an imaginative liar he still stands pre-eminent 
in my experience. He was wont to spend his 
holidays with some relations who dwelt in a little 
fishing village on the east coast, which he repre- 
sented to myself and other greenhorns of the same 
age as a resort of pirates of the most desperate and 
sanguinary description. On the opening day of one 
term he curdled my young blood by a narrative of 
how, stung to madness by the brutality of a detested 
uncle — himself a pirate, but of a poor, degenerate 
type of maritime bandit — who had applied to him 
the degrading appellation of " a beardless stripling," 
he had slain the said uncle, and interred his en- 
sanguined corpse in a quicksand. How, finding 
suspicion thickening about him, he had fled to the 
quay, and had there found a steamer, the captain 
of which, clad in a gold-embroidered uniform and a 
cocked-hat, was ringing a bell and calling out 
" Hurry up ! Any more for India ?" The captain 
had listened to his story, had thanked him in the 
name of the mariners of England for the assassina- 
tion of that " black-hearted swab," his uncle, whose 
nefarious character had been known to all, and had 
engaged him as cabin-boy and first lieutenant. All 
had gone well for a time, but in the neighbour- 
hood of the Hebrides it was discovered that the 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 35 

detrimental uncle was not only not dead, but was 
actually concealed as a stowaway upon that identical 
ship. I have forgotten the subsequent details of 
the story, but I remember that I believed every 

word of it implicitly, and thought C the most 

marvellous of created beings. 

I was, as I have said, ten years of age when my 
sister Mary married. Her husband was a sailor, 

and my schoolfellow C 's wildest legends paled 

in interest beside his narratives of dry fact. Within 
a year of his marriage I was invited to spend my 
summer holiday at his house in Liverpool, and later 
on I made a much longer stay with him. During 
my first visit he lived in a house in Great Homer 
Street, and then in a villa in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of West Derby Road, close to Shiel Park. 
Years later I made a special pilgrimage to find the 
place, but it had disappeared as absolutely as my 
vanished self, who had been so happy there. Had 
I then formed any conscious intention of taking to 
the literary life I might have garnered a golden 
harvest of event from the talk of the old salts who 
night after night yarned to each other over their 
steaming tumblers in the little room my brother-in- 
law called his "cuddy." They were the denizens 
of a world then fast vanishing, and now quite gone. 
The man who conned and steered the first steam- 
ship out of the port of Liverpool was among them, 
another had been concerned with the laying of the 
first transatlantic cable. I remember most clearly 
Captain H , a vast, bush-bearded, beetle- 
browed, old Viking of a man, six feet six inches in 
his stocking-feet, and more than proportionately 



36 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

broad and thick, who was the father of eighteen 
sons. He had never had a daughter, which was 
really a grief to him, hidden under his growling 

formula, " The H s don't breed bitches." It 

was a grand sight to see this superb old heathen 
accompanied by any half-dozen of his boys who 
happened to be at home — they were all sailors — 
going to church of a Sunday morning. I have a 
notion that he was one of the wickedest old villains 
that ever trod a deck, but amorous peccadilloes and 
Bacchanalian orgies had left him a staunch Church- 
man. The eighteen sons, born in triple honourable 
wedlock, were by no means his only contributions 
to the manhood of the rising generation, and it was 
his boast that he had not, on shore, gone to bed 
sober for over fifty years. I can see him now, his 
huge bulk towering amid the smoke-wreaths in the 
cuddy, and hear the succession of short, sharp 
barks in which he spoke. As thus : " This morn- 
ing — reading the paper — shadow falls across it. 
Look up and see — great big devil of a chap — size 
of a house — beard as broad as a shovel. * How 
are ye, Cap'n ? ' says he. Says I, * Who the hell — 
are you ? ' ' I'm Alexander.' * Alexander what ? ' 

— says I. ' Alexander H ,' says he. * D'ye 

mean as you're — a son o' mine?' 'Yes.* 'D'ye 
know your way — to your bedroom ? ' * Yes.' 
' Then go there — be damned to you.' And 
there he is — this present minute — eating my 
victuals — drinking my rum. Suppose it's all right. 
But I don't know. Seems to me there's a chance 
— any damned beach-comber — in the port — o' 
Liverpool — can't get a ship — coming to me — saying 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 37 

he's a son o' mine." I should say that the chances 
of the old gentleman suffering from such an im- 
position were small enough. His sons were all 
indubitable chips of the old block, as big and as 
handsome as himself. 

Naturally and inevitably, these second-hand 
glimpses of sea-life and first-hand impressions of 
marine character inspired me with a burning desire 
for the life of a sailor. That desire was vetoed by 
my father. My brother John, to whom I have 
already alluded, had died in consequence of ex- 
posure aboard ship, aggravated by the cruelty of a 
drunken and brutal skipper. I still regret my 
father's decision. I believe travel to be the finest 
and most valuable part of education, and a few 
years spent in that way, under the care of a kindly 
superior of ripe experience and considerable in- 
telligence, who was actually at hand in the person 
of my brother-in-law, would have been of great 
service to me. I should probably have known a 
little less about books than I actually know, but 
vastly more of men and things, and I should have 
been under salutary discipline, the greatest need 
of a weak and drifting nature, and the influence 
which has been most conspicuously absent from 
my life. 

I left school at fourteen, and, in accordance 
with my father's idea — sensible enough — that every 
man not born to independent means should begin 
life with a working knowledge of some trade or 
handicraft, spent a couple of years in his printing- 
office, as my elder brothers had done before me. 
Having by this time definitely made up my mind 



38 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

that literature was my vocation, and being more- 
over as idle a youngster as ever drew breath, I did 
as little work as I could manage. I had grown 
too big to thrash, and had indeed issued a forth- 
right manifesto to the effect that the reign of what 
Walter Besant called "the first legislator — good 
old Father Stick" — must be considered definitely 
over. So when, a town library having been 
voted by the Town Council, one of the Councillors 
proposed to my father that I should apply for the 
post of sub-librarian, he was probably as glad to 
get rid of me as I was to go. I spent three years 
in that berth, beginning by helping my chief to 
catalogue the books, and having the run of my 
intellectual teeth among them. They were by no 
means a bad collection, for one or two of the book- 
buying committee were men of genuine culture, 
and the time I spent among them gave me the 
greater part of such knowledge of the solider 
English classics as I possess. 

I left the library at seventeen in order to join 
Christie in London. Contrary to my expectations, 
I had rather a dreary time of it. Christie was then 
working in the Press Gallery of the House of 
Commons, and frequently did not get home until 
two or three o'clock in the morning. Naturally he 
spent a good part of the daylight hours in bed. I 
was too young and too raw to be his companion, or 
to see much of his friends, and I was a good deal 
alone. So, when, for some reason or other, he went 
abroad, I went back home with less reluctance than 
I might otherwise have felt. For a time I pre- 
tended to work in the printing-office, and after 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 39 



a while found a berth, through the suggestion of a 
friend of my father, in the office of the local gas- 
works. I had practically nothing to do there, but 
on the strength of copying an occasional letter for 
the chief engineer I called myself his secretary. 
He called me an idle young devil. This period, 
which lasted for three years, had one good effect. 
I came into close daily contact with some four 
hundred members of the proletariat, some skilled 
and many unskilled workers, and so acquired an 
intimate knowledge of them which has given me an 
abiding liking and respect for that thoroughly good 
fellow, the English working man. 

Most of my time at the gasworks was passed in 
the " rodney-house," as the men called the building 
in which they spent the intervals between their 
shifts of labour, eating, drinking, playing cards, and 
swapping stories. Pretty nearly every local accent 
from Northumberland to Cornwall was represented 
among them, and there was a strong dash of the 
Irish element, but I never met a gas-stoker who 
was a Scotsman. The matters in which they were 
disadvantageously differentiated from their social 
superiors were mostly things of the surface, and the 
grisly expletives with which they seasoned their 
talk had no real significance. Taking them in the 
lump, I have never met a better crowd, nor do I 
desire to. The labouring man, in my experience of 
him, has a certain clear, direct simplicity of outlook 
on the world ; a comradeship, so to speak, with the 
bed-rock facts of existence, which is extremely 
healthy and tonic to men of other kinds when they 
have the good luck to meet it and the common 



40 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

sense to value it. There is a sort of person, often 
quite unwitting of any snobbery in his mental 
attitude, who takes it for granted that social virtue 
ceases to exist at some indeterminate point down 
the social scale. It would be a sufficiently silly 
libel on human nature to say that it ceases at any 
point up the scale, but the latter statement would 
be greatly nearer the truth. Hopefulness, tolerance, 
charity, pluck, and the robuster virtues generally 
are necessities of existence to the class who live, 
marry, and rear a family on thirty shillings a week. 
Individual character abounded among the men, 
of course — there is no sort of society in which it 
does not, to an observant eye. One of the stokers 
was a man named St. Clair. He was proud of his 
name, insisted on it being correctly pronounced, 
and would not suffer anybody of his own rank to 
plebeianise it into the commoner form of " Sinclair." 
As he was extremely strong, a more than fair 
amateur pugilist, and perennially ready to take to 
his fists, he had his way in that as in most other 
matters. He was among the half-dozen handsomest 
men I have ever seen in my life, and decidedly 
superior in education to most of his mates. I asked 
him on one occasion why he had never tried to 
better himself, and to rise above mere manual 
labour. " Why should I ? " he asked in return. 
" There are only two things in life worth troubling 
about, the two W's — whisky and women, and I can 
get all I want of them as I am." I am afraid the 
time came when one-half of that statement ceased 
to be true. Another stoker, a blackavized, fierce, 
ugly little man named Green, had somehow become 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 41 

possessed of a very pretty little wife, of whom he 
was inordinately fond and jealous. I was present 
one day when a violent quarrel exploded between 
him and St. Clair, the former accusing his mate of 
evil intent against his domestic peace. The two were 
held apart, and nothing happened for the moment ; 
but a night or two later Green met his rival and his 
wife together in what he chose to consider suspicious 
circumstances, and with a slash of his pocket-knife 
laid St. Clair's cheek open from the corner of the 
lip to the base of the ear. Green received a 
sentence of imprisonment, and St. Clair carried his 
ruined beauty elsewhere, and was no more seen in 
those parts. 

Another of the men I most clearly remember 
was a ganger known about the works by the 
sobriquet of " Softy " — much as Mark Twain's 
astute hero was known as *' Pudd'nhead." He 
was a loosely-built, apple-faced, slouching man of 
late middle-age, with tow-coloured hair which fell 
in a disorderly fringe over his forehead ; prominent, 
sleepy brown eyes ; a pendulous nether lip, and a 
general air of good-natured fatuity. He kept his 
coals in a disused pigstye under the party-wall 
which separated his little strip of garden-ground 
from that of a neighbour. It occurred to him that 
his stock melted with unnatural rapidity. He held 
his own counsel, but one night as he sat at supper 
the noise of a terrific explosion was heard next 
door, and his neighbour's family rushed into the 
street shouting for help. " Softy " was prompt in 
offering assistance, and it was soon perceived that 
no real damage had been done. 



42 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

" How did it come about, 'Zekiel ? " asked an 
acquaintance. 

" Goramighty knows — / don't," replied the 
sufferer. " I was asettin' by the hob, areadin' the 
paaper to the missus, w'en the fire went off wi' 
a bang as flyted we welly out of we'r wits." 

" Ah ! " said " Softy," " it's a rum happennin', 
trewly. If I didn't know what a honest chap thee 
bist, 'Zekiel, I mought ha' thowt as yo'd been 
astealin' my coal. I drilled a hole in a loomp last 
night, an' put a bounce o' blastin* powder in it." 

A grim little incident of this period may be 
added here. Wandering about the works one 
winter evening I came across an old watchman 
apparently asleep in a little hut built of rough 
planking. There was a brazier of coal burning 
beside him, and I gently smeared his nose and 
cheeks with soot collected from the rafters over- 
head. In the morning I heard that the old fellow 
had been found, so decorated, and stone dead. 

I am not — so far as I understand my own 
character — by any means an unfriendly sort of 
person, and in the last thirty years of my life have 
made and kept a very respectable body of friends. 
But in the surroundings amid which my first twenty 
years were passed the more genial side of my 
nature would seem to have been frozen. I hated 
the place I lived in — how much, I really had no 
idea until I finally got away from it and among the 
kind of people in whose society I could expand — 
the people who loved the things I loved, whose life 
was passed in reading, writing, talking, thinking 
books. I was not altogether bereft of this species 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 43 

of companionship. Spencer Leigh Hughes, now 
known to many thousands of readers all over the 
face of England through the columns of keen and 
trenchant comment on current event printed over 
the signature *' Sub Rosa," was at that time in 
the employment of a business house in the High 
Street. He and J. P., the son of a local trades- 
man, who had a passion for the classics, kept me in 
countenance, and their company afforded me most 
of the not too many happy hours I spent during 
this portion of my life. But I heartily disliked 
most of the people with whom I came into contact, 
unlike Christie, who was thoroughly at home among 
them, and studied them with a relishing interest 
which inspired, in "Joseph's Coat," "Aunt Rachel," 
and " Old Blazer's Hero," many of his best pages. 
My sentiment towards my surroundings came out 
in one rather queer form. Between seventeen and 
twenty I was, I believe, as much in love as any boy 
of those years ever has been since love first came on 
earth. I can see her now with absolute distinctness 
as she was then, and she was a singularly pretty little 
person. I have an idea — I suppose I may say so 
at this time of day without risk of being thought 
too much of a coxcomb — that she was not altogether 
averse or indifferent to me, but, sincere as my 
passion was, I sedulously kept out of her way, for 
the simple reason that any tie established between 
us would have been also a link between me and the 
place in which we both lived. I had two conflict- 
ing and tormenting desires regarding her — to look 
at her and to avoid her. In the hideous little 
Independent chapel to which both our families 



44 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

resorted on Sundays her father's pew was slightly 
in front of ours, and she habitually sat in the broad 
shaft of light falling through a large window of 
plain glass, her graceful head silhouetted against 
the panes, and her wonderful mass of hair, of the 
colour of ripe corn, shining in the sunlight. The 
place had been a Gehenna to me until I was old 
enough successfully to revolt against my enforced 
attendance, but a little while after I had gained 
that victory I renounced its fruits and went with 
perfect regularity twice every Sunday, undeterred 
by the droning oratory of the black-gowned ex- 
cheesemonger who, in the pulpit, wrestled with the 
Spirit — and his h's — for the privilege of feasting 
my eyes on the figure of a girl I would not have 
married for her weight in diamonds. I hung at 
night about the street in which she lived, and 
walked incalculable miles to meet her by appa- 
rent accident, but I do not remember that I 
ever spoke twenty consecutive words to her, or 
wanted to. 

It was on the day preceding my twentieth 
birthday that I left my native town to begin my 
literary life as my brother Christie's amanuensis. 
I had done what was perhaps an unusual amount 
of reading for a boy of those years, but next to no 
thinking, and my knowledge of the world outside 
the little place in which my childhood and youth 
had been passed was practically nil. Christie was 
at that time living at Thames Ditton, in a cottage 
facing the Common, and for the first few months of 
my time with him I did no work at all. He had 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 45 

a consuming itch, without any great amount of 
talent, for landscape painting, and for many years 
it was his wont, on the completion of any bit of 
literary work, to devote its proceeds to as long a 
spell of unremunerative canvas-spoiling as they 
would run to, and only to return to labour when 
the wolf was actually at the door. He had recently 
returned from Turkey, whither he had gone as 
special correspondent for the Times during the 
war with Russia, and the funds were already running 
low, but he daubed away with undisturbed placidity, 
and was full to the brim with that sort of splendid 
project which is, compared with accomplished work, 
what apple blossom is to cider. He was the god 
of my youthful idolatry, and I believed in his 
visions as implicitly as he himself, and in my mind's 
eye complacently beheld the pair of us ascending 
rung after rung of the ladder of success towards 
a bright and radiant paradise of literary immortality. 
It is a fine thing to have the capacity of hero- 
worship, but like so many other fine things in this 
exasperating life of ours, it has its drawbacks. To 
model, out of any poor substitute for gold your 
nature may furnish, a glorious statue of perfection 
with the features of some beloved individual is 
the most delightful of occupations to the mind of 
ardently worshipping youth, but when the ungilded 
original will persist in walking into the Holy of 
Holies and knocking whole chunks at a time off 
his counterfeit presentment — your cherished handi- 
work, in which you have much of the pride of a 
creator — it is a saddening experience. 

Very certainly, no man who ever wore the 



46 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

burden of our mortal flesh could have realised my 
boyish conception of my brother : to say in cold 
type at this time of day how far he fell short of 
that foolish and impossible ideal would be as useless 
as it would be painful. Ex parte statements of 
misunderstandings with people who are no longer 
here to present their aspect of the case must always 
be futile. So, although Christie was for some years 
the dominating factor of my life, and although his 
influence will remain indelibly impressed upon my 
career and character so long as I remain alive, I 
shall have little to say regarding him. The noble 
counsel Charles Dickens left to his children is, 
I have long thought, almost as beautiful, and far 
more practicable, than the Golden Rule itself — 
" Be patient with all things which are not coldly 
and deliberately wrong." Of that sort of wrong 
my brother did perhaps as little as any man I 
have ever intimately known. He was kindly — as 
he understood kindliness : generous — as he under- 
stood generosity. His faults were rather those of 
omission than of commission, and, had I been made 
other than I am, might have affected me scarcely 
at all. I am a creature of circumstance, a moral 
chameleon taking the colour of my surroundings, 
and having — so far as I understand the complexities 
of my own nature — very little either of positive 
good or positive evil in me. Christie regarded life, 
not as a task to be performed, not as a discipline 
for any higher experience, not as a stricken field 
wherein to exhibit courage, not as a hospital for the 
practice of philanthropy and unselfishness, not from 
any one of the many usually accepted view-points, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 47 

but as a sort of gigantic Exhibition to whose side- 
shows the management had somehow unaccountably 
and inexcusably neglected to furnish him with a 
complimentary ticket. He was, so to speak, a moral 
deadhead. Had he been a duke and a millionaire 
he would have left a splendid reputation. That 
men who were neither dukes nor millionaires must 
work for their share of the good things of life, and 
must be content even so to forego the richest viands 
of the feast, he would have admitted as a general 
rule. But it was not a rule which applied to him. 
He had a prescriptive right to anything enjoyable 
that happened to be going, and the rest of the 
world — of his particular world — had a right to such 
scraps of the feast as he chose to leave to them. 
Did he possess five pounds, anybody who wanted 
it was welcome to five — or even ten — shillings. Had 
he found himself alone with any other human creature 
on a rock in mid-ocean, with one loaf of bread and 
one jug of water between them, he would have 
eaten the last crumb of the loaf, drunk the last 
drop of the water, and would have wondered — 
quite honestly wondered — at the unconscionable 
selfishness of the other person had he dared to 
object. He spoke generously of all men. He 
was ready at any moment to do anybody any 
service which cost him nothing; and ready also to 
accept the sacrifice of anybody else's life-blood 
with perfect good humour and ingratitude. People 
dependent on such a man are likely to have a 
somewhat mixed and frequently rocky time of 
it, and such a man is not likely to make a 
good guide, philosopher, and friend to a boy of 



48 A STEPSON^ OF FORTUNE 

twenty, ignorant of the world, vacant of any high 
ideal, with a strong body, strong appetites, and 
a feeble will. I owe him one debt, which I grate- 
fully acknowledge. He was, at his best, a quite 
admirable literary craftsman, and any small literary 
ability I may possess received at his hands such 
forming and polishing as it was competent to take. 

The funds resulting from Christie's Turkish 
expedition at last giving out, we shifted our camp 
to London, and settled for awhile in rooms situated 
near the southern end of the Hampstead Road. 
I have a sort of affection for that quarter of London 
to this day, for grimy Tottenham Court Road and 
the semi-squalor of its adjacent streets, whose stones 
are eloquent of many memories of the hours in 
which I first trod them in the flush of untried hope 
and untested courage. It was all Paradise to me 
then, for it was London, and Christie was there, 
and Christie's friends, wonderful people who wrote 
books and contributed to newspapers and composed 
music and painted pictures and acted in theatres, 
men who spoke familiarly of people great in all 
those ways of life, and who were all going one day 
to be great themselves. Many of them were members 
of a society known as " The Cousinhood of the 
Oasis," a club which met once a week during the 
winter months in a private room of some hotel to 
dine and pass the evening in song and conversation. 
They were a more than averagely clever crowd. 
T. P. O'Connor, then newly famous for his " Life 
of Beaconsfield," and recently elected to Parliament 
as a member for one of the divisions of the Borough 
of Liverpool, was one of us. Julian Hawthorne, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 49 

physically the living reproduction of the great prose- 
poet whose name he bears and something of whose 
magical glamour has descended to him, was another. 
Justin McCarthy was a rare but ever-welcome visitor. 
Robert Francillon, then in the full tide of his literary 
productivity ; Richard Gowing, the secretary of the 
Cobden Club ; Rudolf Blind ; Archibald MacNeil, 
the clever young journalist who died so tragically 
and so mysteriously a few years later at Boulogne ; 
Frederick Cowen ; " The Great Twin Brethren," 
Reginald and Eugene Barnett, sons of John Bar- 
nett, composer of " The Mountain Sylph," respec- 
tively the song-writer and music-maker of the 
Club, the first an able journalist, the second the 
inheritor of no mean portion of his father's gift 
of melody; Joseph Williams, one of the finest 
pianists it has ever been my good fortune to listen 
to, and others whose names have since become 
famous, were among them. I was elected a member, 
and found in that circumstance a swelling pride of 
which to-day I might experience a feeble repro- 
duction if I were made a Fellow of the Royal 
Society or a Privy Councillor. 

Another interesting group were the war corre- 
spondents and doctors whom Christie had known in 
Turkey, with marvellous reminiscences of battles 
and sieges and Bulgarian massacres — men who, like 
Tennyson's Ulysses, were a part of all that they 
had seen. Of these, I remember most clearly Dick 
Clancy, whose appearance in the circle was hailed 
with as much astonishment as pleasure, for he had 
been mourned for many months as dead. He had 
been one of the surgeons attached to the army 

E 



50 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

commanded by Mehemet Ali, and had gone through 
a queer experience since his friends had last seen 
him. At some place in Roumelia he had inadver- 
tently strayed beyond the Turkish lines, and had, as 
he himself quaintly expressed it, been " culled " by 
a Russian patrol, and taken before the General in 
command. The General was drunk, which appears 
to have been his perennial condition, and, although 
Clancy's papers had been perfectly satisfactory, had 
sentenced him to be shot as a Turkish spy. Sub- 
ordinate officers had so strongly represented the 
unwisdom of shooting a British subject on so flimsy 
a pretext that the General had repented of that first 
intention, but had ordered poor Clancy to be taken 
at the tail of a bullock-cart to St. Petersburg, and 
months after his luckier colleagues had returned 
to the joys of home he had been still performing 
that interminable journey, at an average rate of 
progress of three miles or so a day, on a diet 
of unsalted mutton and water. He was supposed 
to be negotiating for vast compensation from the 
Russian Government, but I never heard that he 
got any. 

Then there was Daniel O'Brien, also a doctor, 
who had, on the strength of a recent legacy, bought 
a high-class practice and taken a handsome house 
in the neighbourhood of Regent's Park, having to 
that end abandoned his former practice in the 
purlieus of Euston Road, where he had been wont 
to go his rounds among his patients clad in a flat 
tweed cap, a pea-jacket, and Blucher boots, with a 
clay pipe in his mouth, and a bull-dog of abnormal 
ugliness at his heels. He had discarded the pipe 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 51 

and the bull-dog, and had replaced his sartorial 
vagaries by the silk hat, frock-coat, and patent 
leather shoes more commonly worn by reputable 
practitioners. He had an assistant, a compatriot 
answering to the name of Mulligan, who was one of 
the most remarkable-looking people I have ever 
beheld. He had a head which looked precisely as 
if it had been carved out of a gigantic cocoa-nut. 
It was of that colour, and the wiry hair and whiskers 
with which it was decorated were exactly of the tint 
and general appearance of cocoa-nut fibre. His face 
was absolutely incapable of any play of expression, 
you could never know from it whether he was glad 
or sorry, angry or pleased, drunk or sober ; and he 
had a squint of such curious duplicity that it was 
impossible to say not merely at what object, but 
even in what direction, he might be looking. This 
does not read like the description of a successful 
libertine, but that Mulligan had had his triumphs — 
or at least one triumph — in the lists of love was 
evidenced by the appearance several days in succes- 
sion outside his employer's house of a Milesian lady 
of poverty-stricken appearance, who dandled in her 
arms an infant replica of Mulligan, squint included, 
and rent the air with a strident, tuneless chant of 
" Drunken Doctor Mulligan, come out and own 
your bastard." It says much for O'Brien's kind- 
ness of heart, if little for his capacity of maintaining 
his newly acquired respectability, that Mulligan 
was allowed to retain his place as his friend's 
assistant. The conduct of the betrayed lady might 
not perhaps altogether account for the failure of 
O'Brien's attempt at professional regeneration, but 



52 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

soon after her advent the practice was abandoned 
and O'Brien and Mulligan went together to 
Argentina, where I last heard of them, several 
years ago, as prospering greatly. 

To know one Irishman intimately pretty 
generally means to know many others. Calling 
on O'Brien one evening at his house I was shown 
into the surgery, and found him seated in an arm- 
chair on one side of the fireplace, confronting 
another person seated in another armchair on the 
other side of the hearth. This second person 
arrested my attention at once, the more so that 
for quite a while O'Brien took no notice of him 
whatsoever, but entered on the business which had 
occasioned my visit as openly as if we had been 
alone. The stranger was a man of about thirty, 
dressed with conspicuous shabbiness, unshaven 
for at least three days past, and with broken boots 
and dingy linen. He carried in his mouth, up- 
side down, a short wooden pipe, from which little 
streams of tobacco ash trickled over his waistcoat. 
His eyes were open, but fixed and glassy, and a 
second glance told me that he was all but comatose 
with drink. O'Brien presently addressed him. 
" Wake up now, Terence, and be inthrojuiced " 
— enforcing the adjuration by sticking the point 
of his boot into the man's ribs and working it 
vigorously about. Thus addressed, the stranger 
made a paralytic attempt to straighten himself, 
a momentary gleam of intelligence lighted his face, 
and he murmured that he was " very happy." I 
supposed him to be one of O'Brien's innumerable 
eleemosynary patients, and after leaving the house 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 53 

thought no more about him. A day or two later 
I called at the house again, and met O'Brien in the 
act of descending the steps. He was accompanied 
by a good-looking, glossily-dressed individual, 
neatly gloved, booted, and hatted, clean shaven, 
and entirely reputable, " Ye know Macartney," 
said O'Brien. I replied that I had not previously 
had that pleasure, but was delighted to make his 
acquaintance. " Sure, ye made it the other night," 
said O'Brien. ** I inthrojuiced ye in the surgery." 
The mental struggle with which I recognised the 
identity of the well-groomed, gentlemanly person 
now before me with the squalid spectre whose 
memory was evoked by O'Brien's words must have 
been clearly visible in my face, but Macartney gave 
me his hand with a smile. He had a particularly 
charming smile, as gentle as that of a very sweet- 
tempered and very tired baby, with a hint of 
humorous deprecation somehow lurking in it. 
A word or two settled my business with O'Brien, 
who then started off on his daily round, leaving my 
new acquaintance and myself together. "If ye're 
walking," said Macartney, " we might go together." 
We had not gone far when Macartney proposed a 
drink. We entered a bar, and were served with 
our respective beverages, Macartney laying two 
sovereigns on the counter, which the attendant 
barmaid took up with a nod of intelligence. As is 
de rigueur on such occasions, I requited Macartney's 
hospitality at a bar a little further on, and here 
again Macartney gave the barmaid two sovereigns, 
also received and acknowledged with the same 
masonic nod. Macartney was the kind of person 



54 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

one knows as well in an hour as after the acquaint- 
ance of a lifetime, and when this mysterious busi- 
ness had occurred a third time I inquired how it 
happened that he owed precisely the same sum 
at every house we entered. " Owe ! " replied 
Macartney. " Sure I don't owe a penny in all 
London. 'Tis my way of banking, and mighty 
convenient. Ye see, I hardly ever go outside 
this beat, and so I'm never far from my money, 
and when it's gone my credit's good till I draw 
my next instalment." He had been left a com- 
petency by his father, paid to him with rigid 
regularity at the rate of ^^30 on the first of every 
calendar month by a lawyer who punctiliously 
performed the provisions of his deceased client's 
will, and never suffered Macartney to anticipate 
his pension — "not by an hour or a ha'penny," as 
Macartney expressed it. " I keep two sets of 
clothes," he explained, "and when I outrun the 
constable before the end of the month I wear the 
togs you met me in the other night, and send these 
I'm wearing now to the pawnbroker." He seemed 
to see nothing in the least degree odd or out of the 
way in this curious method of life. He was a 
gentleman to the tips of his fingers, in any and 
every stage of alcoholism or sobriety, with a delight- 
ful, spontaneous charm of manner, and he was 
extremely well-connected, a maternal uncle being 
a high dignitary of the Roman Church. His one 
weak spot was his insatiable craving for alcohol. 
He must have had a superb physique, for he told 
me, in a fashion as far removed from braggadocio 
as from shame, merely as a casual statement, that he 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 55 

had not gone to bed sober since he had left school ; 
but, except when actually intoxicated, he showed 
not the slightest symptom of this ruinous enslave- 
ment. He had no hopes, no ambitions, no regrets, 
but carried himself with a quiet, even, modest cheer- 
fulness. The one thing he cared for in the world 
except brandy was O'Brien, and when the latter 
migrated, as already said, to Argentina with 
Mulligan, Macartney went also. The last I heard 
of him was contained in a phrase of a letter of 
O'Brien's — "Terence is doing splendidly, and will 
do better yet, if I can only persuade him that 
Martell's Three Star, taken neat by the tumbler, 
is not the best temperance beverage for a tropical 
climate." 

Macartney is associated in my mind with one 
curious reminiscence. We were strolling in the 
promenade of the Alhambra one evening, when we 
came face to face with a woman who was obviously 
an habitu6e of the place. I might have passed her 
unregarded had it not been so evident from the 
manner of both that she and Macartney knew each 
other, and that there was in common between them 
some sentiment or emotion of no common kind. 
She was a handsome woman, with a thin, haggard 
face and an unhealthy, unnatural glitter in her eyes. 
As her glance fell on my companion she started 
violently, and seemed for a moment on the point of 
addressing him, but suddenly averted her face and 
hurried past. " That's devilish odd," said Macart- 
ney to himself; *' a queer coincidence entirely. It's 
six months and more since I've seen that woman," 
he continued, •' and 'twas on this very spot I saw 



56 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

her last. Do you remember," he asked, after a 
pause, "a young CathoHc priest attached to the 

chapel in Street, that cut his throat, leaving a 

confession behind him saying why he'd done it?" 
I remembered the case perfectly. It had been a 
tragedy with which all London had rung for a day 
or two a few months previously. The poor young 
priest, little more than a boy in years, had stated in 
his confession that he had been false to his priestly 
vow, and was no longer fit to live, and had added a 
passionate prayer that the woman who had ruined 
him here and hereafter might be pardoned her 
atrocious sin. " That was the woman," said 
Macartney. " The night it happened she came in 
here, and 'twas on this very spot where we're now 
standing, that she told me — gloating over her 
triumph, the hell-cat — that she'd * got round ' poor 

at last. I told her — well, never mind what I 

said to her. I was bred a Catholic, whatever I may 
be now, which perhaps is a point I'm not altogether 
clear on. I told her what I thought of her, any- 
how, and she went away laughing at me and calling 

me a spooney and a milksop. Poor 's suicide 

was in the papers next night, and his blood is on 
that woman's head. She knows it, too — she's just 
withering with remorse, and she's drinking like a 
fish — don't I know the symptoms ? " I never saw 
the woman again, but I shall remember her face 
as she recognised Macartney as long as I remember 
anything. 

It was at a somewhat later period that I made 
the acquaintance of another Irishman. He had no 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 57 

connection with the little band of eccentrics with 
whom I have just been dealing, nor, indeed, with 
any set of people, but was one of the most solitary- 
creatures I have ever known. He was curiously 
diminutive in figure, with a disproportionately large 
head. His features in youth must have been 
markedly handsome. They still expressed a keen 
intellectuality, and his eyes, in moments of interest, 
were as lambent as a dog's. His general ex- 
pression was one of intense but patient suffering. 
We had been indifferent acquaintances for many 
months when I got my first glimpse into his history 
and real character. I went one night, a minute or 
two before twelve o'clock, into a bar in New Oxford 
Street — the place is a second-hand book-shop now 
— and found him sitting on a high stool, his right 
hand curled round a tumbler of whisky, and in his 
left a watch, which he was regarding with an intense 

and hungry stare. " Hullo, D ," I exclaimed. 

" How are you ? " " Hould your whisht ! " he 
growled in answer, still with his gaze riveted on 
the dial. The finger crawled slowly to the hour, 
the watch slid into his pocket, and the contents of 
the tumbler were transferred to his stomach with a 
horrible avidity. " Give me another of those," he 
said to the attendant. " Look here," he continued 

to me, "my address is . Just remember that, 

and see me into a cab when this place closes." I 
had no need to ask an explanation of this curious 
conduct, he volunteered it in the intervals of 
swallowing glass on glass of spirit with incredible 
rapidity. The liquor he was now drinking was the 
first he had tasted for two years, "all owing," he 



58 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

said, " to the Cyardinal," by which disrespect- 
ful term he meant to indicate Henry Edward 
Manning, who, it appeared, was his Hfe-long friend. 
Manning, as all the world knows, was a fervent 
public advocate of temperance, and, as all the world 
is far from knowing, gave himself an infinity of 
trouble to redeem victims of the drink habit in 

whom he took an especial private interest. D 

was one of those unfortunates, and for years past 
his fanatical love and admiration of the great prelate 
had been the one anchor which had kept him from 
drifting to irremediable ruin. From time to time 
he gave the Cardinal a six months' pledge, binding 
himself to take no alcohol whatsoever during that 
period, and he had given a perpetual promise that 
he would keep none about him, that no sort of 
intoxicant should ever enter the rooms in which he 
lived. This was the explanation of his furious 
eagerness to take advantage of the half-hour now 
at his disposal. " That blasted ould black vulture," 
— which was D.'s way of referring to the Cardinal's 
clerical secretary. Father , would be at his bed- 
side next morning with another pledge for him to 
sign, and this was the first time in two whole years 
he had been able to dodge him, either he or the 
Cardinal having succeeded four successive times in 
anticipating, by at least a day, the expiry of the 
agreement. D had been originally, like Man- 
ning himself, a Protestant, and had followed his 
great idol into the Roman fold. He told me that 
he owed all that he possessed, and life itself, to the 
Cardinal, who had kept him from the drink and 
found him employment in a dozen ways, mainly as 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 59 

a contributor to Roman Catholic journals and in 
historical research. He was a man of great natural 
talent and of really remarkable learning, especially 
in the classics, the Fathers of the Church, and Italian 
literature. I remember that one night he challenged 
me to read a line from the " Divina Commedia," to 
which he could not provide the context, and after 
trying for half an hour I did not find him once at 
fault. How old he was, I never knew, but he 
spoke familiarly of famous people who had been 
dead for many years. He had known Coleridge — 
not, alas ! the Coleridge Shelley described in his 
letter to Maria Gisborne — 

" he who sat obscure 
In the exceeding lustre and the pure 
Intense irradiation of a mind. 
Which, with its own internal lustre blind, 
Flagged wearily through darkness and despair — 
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, 
A hooded eagle among blinking owls" — 

but an obese, grey-haired, unvenerable old figure, 
writing journalistic slip-slop for a daily paper, 
shuffling about the Strand in shapeless list slippers, 
and pouring out his marvellous accumulations of 
thought and scholarship on anybody who would 
stand him twopenn'orth of gin. 

It is extremely curious to note how exactly, in 
many important particulars, a man's life is the result 
of physical peculiarities which might, to a careless 
observer, pass as absolutely negligible. My own 
career has, I am convinced, been deeply influenced 
by the fact that I have practically no sense of smell, 



60 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

and, consequently, only a faint sense of taste. I 
know men to whom a delicate dish or a high-class 
wine are what a sonorous verse was to Keats, what 
a flush of sunset colour was to Turner, what the 
exquisitely flowing line of a shapely woman's bust 
and shoulder must have been to Praxiteles or 
Canova. To me, it is nothing. I eat only to 
satisfy hunger, and drink merely to quench thirst, 
or for the enjoyment of the quickened pulse and 
brightened fancy alcohol has the power to give. 
My conception of a good dinner is a well-cooked 
steak and a pot of stout, and I prefer American 
cigarettes at ten for twopence-ha'penny to the 
choicest nicotian product of Asia Minor. Early 
training may very likely have indurated this plebeian 
coarseness of palate. There was always plenty to 
eat at home, but the menu was almost as simple as 
that of Pope's cockney tradesman — 

" One solid dish his week-day meal affords, 
An added pudding solemnised the Lord's." 

Another physical peculiarity of mine — or so I have 
been assured by a high scientific authority — is that 
my heart is slightly too big for my body. The 
result is that I am — or rather was, for increasing 
years have made a difference — much less pervious 
to cold than most other people. I never had the 
dandy instinct, and never, in my most prosperous 
times, cared to be anything more than physically 
clean and sartorially unremarkable. Now, it is the 
most obvious of economic truisms that a solitary 
man works only for the ability to satisfy his personal 
needs, and the more Nature diminishes the number 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 61 

or the intensity of those needs the less work he will 
do, unless he is affected by that curious sporadic 
imbecility which finds delight in labour for its own 
sake. And that is not one of my many weaknesses. 
I loathe labour, and love idleness. I have known 
spells of furious effort in my time, but that was when 
I have been so obsessed by some idea that life was 
a torment until I had managed to get my inspiration 
fixed on paper. Bereft of that spur to effort I work, 
as my immortal compatriot joked, "wi' deefficulty." 
A poor man to whom delicate food is a necessity 
will work harder than one to whom it is indifferent. 
A poor man to whom thick underclothing and a 
well-lined overcoat are necessities of existence, or 
who yearns to shine in splendid raiment, must 
work to satisfy his needs or his tastes. (Balzac 
wrote the tragedy of the over-educated palate 
in " Cousin Pons." An equal genius might per- 
haps find as great a book in the life of a 
poverty-stricken dandy.) I have had neither of 
these incentives to labour. Had I had them I 
might have worked harder — I might even have 
beaten my luck, and arrived at a measure of 
wealth and consideration I can now never hope 
to know. 

Physical needs are, of course, by no means the 
only spurs to intellectual effort. The love of money 
and the desire of fame are frequent and potent 
incentives. But they also have failed me. My 
carelessness of money — I might almost call it a sort 
of chemical antipathy between myself and the 
medium of exchange, I have so flung away and 
spurned the precious metals whenever I have had 



62 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

the opportunity — is ineradicable. I have tried 
many methods of self-cure, but in vain. One 
means seemed for a time to have succeeded. I 
took to hoarding coins, a heterogenous mixture 
of bronze, silver, and gold, in a drawer, hoping 
thereby to arouse in myself the miserly instinct 
which gloats over such accumulations. I denied 
myself even books and tobacco for the pleasure 
of adding to my secret pile, and began to flatter 
myself that the true spirit of Harpagon was enter- 
ing into me. But the moment inevitably came 
when some sudden temptation triumphed over my 
acquired miserliness. My incapacity either to make 
or to hold money is congenital. My father had, as 
I never had, the means of acquiring wealth actually 
under his hand, but, after a life of work and worry 
he only just shaved the Insolvent Court. For years 
he had the only printing-office in a rapidly-growing 
town, but his one preoccupation as a tradesman was 
to fulfil any order he received at the lowest possible 
price. This curious ineptness in business was, even 
more curiously, accompanied by a genuine talent 
for finance on the great scale. I have heard him at 
a political meeting criticise the Imperial Budget of 
the year in a speech of over an hour's duration, in 
the course of which he reviewed the fluctuations of 
taxation and revenue, and the expenditure of pre- 
vious governments, quoting dates and figures with 
marvellous fluency and accuracy, and without so 
much as a note to help him. The needs of a swarm 
of children forced him to industry, but he was 
temperamentally the idlest of men — so idle that he 
would rather sit for hours chewing the stem of an 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 63 

empty pipe than take the trouble to fill it. Of 
ambition he had not a particle. I am his true son 
in that respect also, with a slight difference. In 
my early days I did most strongly desire what still 
seems to me by far the sweetest morsel success has 
to offer — the recognition of the best and greatest of 
my fellow-craftsmen. To have been hailed as a 
brother by the artists I loved and honoured, to 
have been received as the peer of Tennyson and 
Browning, of Meredith and Zola, I would have 
given and suffered much. That dream faded very 
early, not long after the date at which I began to 
work really in earnest, and it can seem hardly more 
hopeless to my most unfriendly critic than it does to 
myself at this time of day. I fancy I know my own 
intellectual stature fairly well. I stand almost as 
high as the underside of Zola's ankle-bone, and am 
at least as tall as the sole of Meredith's shoe is 
thick. And for *' fame " as it is ordinarily under- 
stood, to be talked about by people whose faces I 
shall never see, to be a household word within the 
arctic circle and under the tropics, was an idea 
which never quickened my pulse by a single beat 
per minute. 

I have had during my life one luxury which to 
me was a necessity, and without which life would 
not be worth living at all — books. And books are 
nowadays — thank the kindly Fates — the cheapest 
of all luxuries. To dine with Apicius or to be 
seen in the Park with Alcibiades are costly plea- 
sures. You must repay the hospitality of Apicius 
with dinners as good, or nearly as good, as his 
own ; you must dress up to, or within measurable 



64 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

distance of, the Prince of Dandies ere he will 
tolerate your society. But for a few shillings you 
can gather together in one glorious company the 
poets and sages and humorists of all time under 
the poorest roof that ever failed to keep out the 
rain. It was Gibbon who said that he would not 
barter his love of reading for the wealth of India, 
and I think it was also Gibbon who declared that 
he had never known a trouble he could not forget 
over a book. I can heartily repeat and endorse 
both statements. 

With such a temperament, and cast, a raw 
young yokel of twenty, into the vortex of Bohemian 
life with no wise hand to guide me, it is less matter 
for surprise than for regret that the first years of 
my time in London were absolutely fooled away, at 
some cost to health, and at a much greater cost to 
possessions even better worth preserving. I am 
not going to pull a long face and preach a sermon, 
or to deny that I look back on that wasted time 
with a good deal of pleasure. I hurt nobody but 
myself, and myself not very much. In the twenties, 
wine — or such cheaper substitutes as came my 
way — was sweet, women were kissable, and ginger 
of many flavours and qualities was hot in the 
mouth. I hunted pleasure as and how I could, 
and youth, in that market, is current coin, and 
buys vastly more than gold can command. The 
youngster who can only get a bottle or a kiss by 
paying money down for it is a dull dog. I wish, 
not that I had taken less pleasure, but that I had 
done more work. I regret, not that I have loved 
many women, but that I did not earlier find the one 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 65 

woman I could love sufficiently to take her for a 
life-companion, and, with her beside me, face the 
realities of existence as the wiser among my con- 
temporaries did. My memories of the Primrose 
Path are pleasant, and if I lingered in it longer 
than was wise, the gods were good to me, in that 
they turned my steps to safer ways before I had 
arrived at the precipice in which, for so many, it 
ends. They were good to me also in my least 
regenerate days, for they sent me women-friends of 
another sort than those with whom perhaps too 
much of my time was spent, and gave me at least 
the grace to appreciate their quieter charm. Good 
feminine society — once again, thank the kindly 
Fates — is not a costly luxury. The society of the 
women best worth knowing certainly costs next 
to nothing at all. A weekly expenditure of a few 
shillings on a laundress and a few coppers on a 
bootblack will ensure any young man of passable 
manners and appearance the entree to the circle of 
as many amiable and clever women as he can need 
to know, even if his coat be a little — or more than 
a little — shabby. I was poor indeed if I could not 
manage a clean shirt and a street-corner shine on 
Sunday, and so fortified could feel myself the 
welcome guest of more than one lady whom it was 
a dear privilege to know, and especially of one. It 
is more than twenty years since I have seen her 
face, since a cruel caprice of Fate broke the happy 
circle of which she was the centre, since I entered 
the neat room, with its little rosewood piano, its 
sober rows of books, its pretty trifles of ivory and 
glass and bronze, its good, incommunicable odour of 

F 



66 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

peace, and quiet, and honest friendliness, in which 
she held her little court. Others than the happy 
band I knew there tenant the little room now, the 
last echo of the music she made for us has died 
away, the kind faces are scattered, some of the 
friendly voices have passed into the eternal silence, 
and the Lady sits, with Grief for a companion, in 
other places that I shall not know. 

Among other memories of feminine friendship 
which were entirely for good in their influence on 
my undeveloped character, let that of Marie Ponce- 
let find a place. (That was not her real name.) 
Marie takes rank as one of the prettiest girls it was 
ever my good luck to meet, and I see her now as I 
saw her first, standing beside the piano set in the 
light of the big window of E. B.'s sitting-room on 
the first-floor of a house in South Crescent, Store 
Street, Tottenham Court Road — a vanished land- 
mark. Set on her mass of jet-black curls, and 
heightening the fire of her big black eyes, is a 
scarlet velvet Tam-o'-Shanter, and her figure, 
suggesting a statuette fresh from the hand of some 
consummate artist, shows its perfect lines under a 
jersey of navy blue. She is trilling, in a sweet, 
reedy thread of a voice, like the evening song of an 
immature throstle, the pretty French ballad, '' La 
Premiere Feuille," to E. B.'s accompaniment, and 
nine-and-twenty years have rolled away from my 
shoulders, and I am young again. 

Marie owed to Providence certain good and 
enviable gifts, her beauty, which was her stock- 
in-trade as an artists' model and figurante, her 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 67 

touching little thread of a voice, an unconquerable 
merry courage which I never saw for one moment 
depressed, and very little else. To know her 
parents was to wonder what kindly freak of atavism 
had produced so lovely a flower from so unpromising 
a soil. Her father was a Dutchman of French 
extraction, and by trade a cobbler. He was also 
a furious drunkard. Out of his cups there was not 
much the matter with him except an invincible 
aversion to soap : in them, his most marked charac- 
teristic was a horrible desire to kill or mutilate his 
daughter. On one occasion he had awaited her 
home-coming, hidden behind the street door armed 
with his lapstone. A fellow-lodger in the house 
was a young brazier, well known later in sporting 
circles as a middle-weight pugilist, and at that date 
fast rising into fame as a brilliant amateur. The 
fond father made the grievous error of mistaking 
this person for Marie, and landed him on the top 
of his hat — fortunately a hard and high one — with 
the lapstone. I am happy to record that the rising 
young pugilist damaged the nice old gentleman 
rather severely, and sorry to say that Marie nursed 
him with the tenderest care through his consequent 
dilapidations. On another occasion years earlier, 
while Marie was the most popular child-model in 
London, her father had held her down on the sofa 
with the expressed intention of picking out her eyes 
with a steel fork. He was restrained from that 
enterprise by Marie's mother, whose outraged 
maternity found vent in these remarkable words — 

"You old fool, if you spoil the girl's looks, 

where's our living coming from.-*" The artless 



68 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

appeal went straight home to the paternal heart, 
and Marie's sight was spared. 

Such were Marie's parents, and for them the 
good, brave child worked with perfect cheerfulness, 
giving them by far the greater part of her earnings 
as model and ballet-girl, and keeping the two rooms 
she shared with them on the top-floor of the squalid 
house in Windmill Street as neat as hands could 
make them. She could at any moment have left 
their horrible society and their sordid surroundings 
for comfort and affluence, but at a price which 
neither gold nor love could pay. It was Marie's 
quaint and pathetic ambition " to marry a gentle- 
man," and to do that she held that she must " go 
straight" — she pronounced it " strite," for although 
she spoke French very prettily her English was the 
English of the quasi-slum in which her life had been 
passed. It was a simple ambition, and a simple 
ethic, but it sufficed, and I do not believe that all 
the gold ever coined could have bought Marie's 
virtue. And I have met loads of women who 
wouldn't have known her who have not done nearly 
so much to cleanse my ideal of womanhood and 
fortify my faith in human nature as Marie Poncelet, 
the Dutch-cockney artists' model and ballet-girl. 

Marie and I became sweethearts. If my young 
and ardent imagination had ever pictured us in a 
less moral relationship her forthright plainness of 
speech soon corrected my delusion. Kisses there 
were in plenty — Marie frankly confessed that she 
loved kissing — but it stopped at that. Together 
we haunted the Thames steamers and Kew Gardens 
and the Parks and Hampstead Heath and the pits 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 69 

and galleries of many theatres and music halls. We 
held cheap revel, when my funds permitted, at the 
"Welsh Harp" which is " 'Endon way," as my 
friend Albert Chevalier tells us in his delightful 
ballad, of which bards of loftier name might well 
envy the mirth and tenderness, and at the " Bull 
and Bush." How juicy were the chops, how good 
the beer, how verdant the watercresses, of those 
humble feasts in the green arbours of those suburban 
hostelries. 

Marie was a clever girl, and knew a good deal 
of human nature — especially of masculine human 
nature. Rigidly virtuous as she was, she yet recog- 
nised that a pretty woman's capital is not entirely 
expressed by the number of the pence in her purse. 
I remember a little incident illustrative of her 
harmless impudence and innocent guile. We 
were returning to Town together, dog-tired after a 
long day's ramble in the country between the 
Heath and Harrow-on-the-Hill, when, outside the 
Spaniard's, we saw an empty four-wheeled cab. As 
we approached, the cabman issued from the bar, 
drawing the back of his hand across his mouth, like 
a man refreshed. " We'll take that cab," said 
Marie. I pointed out that our common funds 
amounted to a poor fourteen-pence. " All right," 
said Marie. " Stay 'ere a minute in the shadder." 
I obeyed, and she advanced, with exaggerated 
symptoms of fatigue. The cabman had mounted 
the box and gathered up the reins. "Are you 
going back into Town ? " asked Marie. " Yes, 
Missie," said the cabman. '* Oh, I wonder if you'd 
give me a lift ? I am so tired." " Why, o' course 



70 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

I will," said the cabman. " You look fit to drop. 
Jump in, an' welcome." " And you won't mind my 
friend coming too, will you ? " asked the abominable 
little serpent, producing me from the shadow. I 
can see them now, Marie and the cabman, she look- 
ing up at him with big, trustful eyes, he looking 
down at us with surprise and disgust slowly giving 
way on his broad, red face before his honest appre- 
ciation of her clever impudence. "Well, may I 

" he began, and then grinned outright. " You 

little snike in the grarss ! " he chuckled. " You've 
copped me fair. Skip in, the pair of you." And 
Marie, with her tired head drooping on my shoulder, 
laughed softly to herself until she fell asleep. 

The ever-rolling, silent hours, whose furtive 
flight have made an elderly man of me, and — how 
much more cruel ! — an old woman of Marie, parted 
us, and since those bright days I have only twice 
seen her. On the first of those occasions she was 
brilliantly happy, for she had accomplished the 
dream of her life. She had married a gentleman, 
and the world had nothing more to yield her — 
except the "linked sweetness, long drawn out," of 
slaving herself to the bone to maintain him and his 
children. He was indubitably a gendeman, the 
younger son of a landless baronet of ancient family, 
and the most placidly incompetent and amiably 
selfish person that ever drew breath. " You can't 
think 'ow good he is," she told me. Twelve years 
later, when Robert Buchanan and myself had taken 
the Opera Comique and were rehearsing The 
Society Butterfly, the stage-door keeper one morn- 
ing brought to me a slip of paper, bearing in 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 71 

pencil the one word " Marie." I ran up to the hall, 
and found there a little, elderly woman, a monument 
of shabbiness, faded, wrinkled, with threads of grey 
in her hair. I know that my amazement and dis- 
appointment were readable in my face, and have 
often wanted to get outside my own body and kick 
myself for it. " I saw your name in the paper," 
said Marie, " and I thought you wouldn't mind me 
callin'." It was like holding parley with a ghost. 
It was the same clear, birdlike voice, but all the old 
fresh, frank gaiety had gone. " Is there any chance 
for me in the piece, 'Arry ?" I could only say, as 
was indeed the case, that there was absolutely 
nothing for her. " Well, better luck next time," 
said Marie. " I 'ope you'll 'ave a real big success. 
You 'aven't forgot the old times. I can see that in 
your face." " You have been ill, I am afraid," I 
said. She nodded. "Typhoid. Just out of the 
'ospital — the Middlesex. They thought as I was 
goin' under, the doctor told me, mais ne claque pas 
qui veut — though I shouldn't say that. There's the 
kids. Six of 'em." " And your husband ? " " Dead, 
two years ago." " Don't let us lose sight of each 
other now we have met again," I said. " Write to 
me here." She promised, and so we parted. She 
never wrote, and I have never seen her since. 

To a little later period belong my memories of 
Captain Talbot — which is neither the real name nor 
the real rank in the army of the person of whom I 
speak. I met him through my brother, who had 
made his acquaintance in Turkey, where Talbot 
had occupied a post as officer of the gendarmerie. 
He was a grey, mild-mannered, careworn looking 



72 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

man, obese, slow of speech, and diffident of manner, 
as little like the conventional military hero as one 
could easily imagine. Yet he was a V.C., and had 
accomplished many deeds of quiet and desperate 
valour. Christie having gone abroad, I was left in 
London on my own resources, and Talbot being as 
hard up as myself we made a menage of it, and took 
a double-bedded room in Euston Street. Talbot 
had a small pension, and I earned an occasional 
guinea or two by a short story or a set of verses, 
and we got along somehow, although on more than 
one occasion we had only one coat and waistcoat 
between us. Since Talbot was much the bigger 
man that coat and waistcoat were of course his, and 
when I wore them it was a case of David in Saul's 
armour. 

Talbot, the most friendly of men, was also one 
of the most reticent, and we had lived together for 
some months before I learned the details of a story 
as sad as any I have ever heard or read. Return- 
ing home one evening, I saw, standing at the corner 
of Euston Street, a lady. Ladies on foot are not 
common objects in that neighbourhood, and I 
looked at her with some interest in passing. The 
house in which I lived with Talbot was only a few 
yards from the spot on which she stood, and as I 
inserted my latchkey, I saw that she was watching 
me with obvious interest. I thought for a moment 
that she was about to address me, and turned 
towards her, but she wheeled abruptly and passed 
out of sight. The little incident had quite left my 
mind when, on a night a week or so later, on 
entering our room, I found Talbot sitting at the 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 73 

table with his head between his hands, so absorbed 
that he took no note of my entrance. The cheap 
oil-lamp was alight, and I saw, lying on the table, a 
large panel photograph — a portrait of the lady I 
had seen at the corner of the street. I could not 
repress an exclamation of surprise. It roused him. 
** Ah, young 'un," he said. ** You are back again. 
I was just looking at my wife*s portrait, and think- 
ing. Thinking of old times." I had known 
vaguely that he was a married man, but he had 
never spoken of his married life to me before, and 
I, of course, had respected his silence. " A pretty 
woman, isn't she ? " With some natural doubt and 
trepidation, I told him of the glimpse I had recently 
had of the original of the portrait in the street 
outside. He nodded calmly, and taking the 
photograph from my hand, put it into the chest-of- 
drawers, and lay down on his bed. It was a full 
half-hour before he spoke again. " I'll tell you 
about it, if you'd care to hear," he said then ; and 
the story he told me was as follows : — 

He had married, at three-and-twenty, the daugh- 
ter of a General Officer. Fifteen months later, a 
child, a boy, was born, and a month after that 
event Talbot had been ordered abroad, to India. 
Circumstances not merely prevented his wife 
accompanying him, but again and again intervened 
to prevent her joining him. They were apart for 
nearly four years, and then, to the indescribable joy 
of both, he was ordered home again. He assured 
me that during the whole of that time he was abso- 
lutely faithful to his marriage vow. I believe the 
statement implicitly, for I have seldom known a 



74 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

more truthful man. On his way home he touched 
at Brindisi. There, in the hotel at which he put 
up, he met a certain woman. He did not mention 
her name, but spoke of her simply as an old 
acquaintance with whom, previous to his marriage, 
he had had intimate amatory relations. His wife 
arrived in Brindisi early on the following morning. 
She had come without warning him, in order to 
give him a joyful surprise. She saw him and the 
other woman together in circumstances which could 
leave no doubt as to their momentary relation, and 
she then and there repudiated and cast him off. He 
had pleaded with her as a coward might plead for 
life. He had sworn to her that the cruelty of cir- 
cumstance had betrayed him in the one moment of 
weakness he had known in four long, dreary years 
of solitude, but all in vain. They had met since 
some half-dozen times in the presence of witnesses 
— never alone — to discuss business in the interests 
of their boy, but that was all the communication 
they had had together. She had sent him various 
sums of money anonymously from time to time — 
her people were wealthy — but he had sent them 
back, and as she never repudiated the gifts, he was 
certain they had come from her. 

I took heart of grace to try if matters were not 
mendable. I pointed out that the anonymous gifts, 
and her presence in the street on the night I had 
seen her — he had caught sight of her himself on 
more than one occasion hovering near other places 
in which he had lived — were hopeful signs that she 
had repented of her harshness. Rather than that 
two people who loved each other should drag out 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 75 

their lives so miserably apart, would it not be well 
for him — was it not his duty as having first offended 
— to make some overture towards reconciliation ? 
" No," he said, with a quiet sternness which I felt to 
be unshakeable. He neither denied nor extenuated 
his offence, but the first step must be made by his 
wife. It never was made by either. 

I have other memories, less tragic, associated 
with poor Talbot, one of which shall be set down 
here. As I have already stated, he had a pension, 
which was paid quarterly. For some days before 
one of those payments was due, our funds had 
fallen to zero, and a little bread-shop, which some- 
times permitted us to run a very small credit- 
account, refused further supplies. On the last day 
our diet was atmospheric air, au naturel, and water. 
On the long-expected and much wished-for morning 
Talbot assumed *' the reliever," as we called the one 
coat we had between us, and sallied out to touch 
his money, promising to return with supplies of 
provender before one o'clock. One o'clock came, 
but brought no Talbot, and the afternoon and even- 
ing dragged their interminable length along until, 
clean worn out with hunger and hope deferred, I 
lay down on my bed and went to sleep. I was 
wakened by a shock of sound, and, lighting the 
lamp — it had grown quite dark by this time — dis- 
covered Talbot lying on the floor in a condition of 
hopeless collapse. Assisting him to undress, I got 
him into bed, and then went through his clothes, 
but there was not a coin in his pockets. On my 
demanding an explanation he would say nothing 
but that it was " all ri' — qui' ri' — " and that " the 



76 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

money was in the wall." He repeated this amazing 
statement several times with an air of ereat 
triumph, and finally fell asleep. 

In the morning, the mystery — or rather the two 
mysteries, for that so good a fellow and so loyal 
a chum as Talbot should have gone on a burst with 
a hungry friend waiting for him at home was in 
itself a most mysterious thing — was explained. 
While drawing his pension, he had met an old 
fellow-campaigner, who had offered him a glass of 
wine. Poor Talbot, who had no more head for 
liquor at the best of times than a baby, had accepted, 
and from the moment the wine had fallen into his 
poor empty stomach remembered nothing at all. 
" What did you mean," I asked him, " by saying 
that the money was * in the wall ' ? " My query lit 
a partial gleam of memory. " Yes," he said feebly. 
*'I remember now. I came across a wall somewhere 
or other, and there was a big crack in it, and I put 
the money in the crack." "But where is the wall ?" 
I asked. " I'll be shot if I know," he said, clutch- 
ing his hair helplessly, and there for some time the 
matter rested. 

Readers of Wilkie CoUins's clever story, " The 
Moonstone," will remember the fashion in which 
a mystery regarding the hiding-place of a great 
jewel is solved. The stone has been hidden by a 
man in an over-wrought nervous condition, and 
under the influence of a narcotic. Months after, 
having induced precisely similar circumstances, he 
remembers where he hid the missing gem. It 
occurred to me that if I could get Talbot into the 
same state of mind as that in which he had hidden 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 77 

his pension-money he might remember the situation 
of the wall to which he had confided it. So, next 
time we possessed the necessary funds, I took him 
out and made him drunk. But the psychological 
experiment was an utter failure. I have not often 
seen a more comically doleful exhibition than was 
presented by Talbot, shaking the tears of maudlin 
desperation off his nose, and singing, in a kind of 
plaintive chant, " I can see the damned wall, but I 
do' no where it is ! " 

Life is made up of meetings and partings, and 
Talbot and I ceased to be companions, although we 
remained close friends. He was unlucky to the 
end, and unluckiest of all at the very end. An old 
comrade who had started a military cramming 
establishment took him as assistant. The school 
throve exceedingly, and Talbot's friend, who was 
a childless widower without a relative in the world, 
promised Talbot that he should succeed to the 
business. And then, after a brief glimpse of at 
least a spell of ease and comfort to atone for so long 
a time of poverty and heart-break so bravely borne, 
poor Talbot died. 

The incident of Talbot hiding his pension- 
money in the wall reminds me of two other little 
occurrences of a similar sort, which happened years 
earlier, when, as a boy of seventeen, I first lived in 
London for a brief time with Christie. His house- 
chum at that period was the clever and genial 
young Irish artist who figures in his novel, "A 
Model Father," as " Bill Cassidy," a name which 
may also do service here. The common stock of 
tobacco had given out, when Cassidy bethought 



78 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

him of an old lidless jar of terra-cotta, stowed away 
on the top shelf of a cupboard in his bedroom. " I 
believe I left half-a-dozen pipefuls in it," he said as 
he mounted a chair to take down the jar. The 
half-dozen pipefuls were there, sure enough, and 
under the layer of tobacco were four sovereigns. 
On another occasion, when we could barely muster a 
sixpence between us, we made an inventory of our 
properties to determine which among them should 
go to the pawnbroker. The article best spareable 
— it was hot summer weather — was a heavy ulster 
belonging to Christie. Going over it in search of 
any odd trifles its pockets might contain, he found 
in the little ticket-pocket in the cuff of the left 
sleeve, a five-pound note. 

Certain acquaintances I made at about this time 
are worthy at least of a passing mention here. One 
of the most interesting among them was a certain 
Anatole Cheriere — that was not his name, nor in 
the least degree like it. He was of mixed nation- 
ality, his father having been a French artist of 
considerable reputation, and his mother an Irish 
lady. He spoke both languages with perfect ease 
and grammatical correctness, and wrote both suffi- 
ciently well to contribute to leading French and 
English journals, but his pronunciation of English 
was a curious mingling of Gallic and Hibernian 
accents. At the time I first met him he was acting 
as London correspondent of an important Paris 
paper. He was a thoroughly charming and a 
thoroughly good fellow, with no vice worse than an 
unconquerable idleness, but for which his really 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 79 

considerable talents might have carried him far. 
His appointment as correspondent had rescued him 
from a long spell of unremunerative poverty, and 
had inspired him with a momentary love of labour 
and desire for respectability. He had taken a 
house in Acacia Road, Brixton, and I have often 
wondered, and wonder still, what the ultra-British 
bourgeois who forms the staple of the inhabitants 
of that region must have thought of him and his 
family, who might have been transported bodily out 
of the pages of Henri Murger or Paul de Kock. 
His wife, who, like his mother, was Irish, was that 
curious and rare phenomenon, an extraordinarily 
pretty woman minus that moderate dose of healthy 
vanity which makes most of her sex careful to 
supplement their charms by the legitimate artifices 
of the toilet. She had a mass of splendid hair, 
which generally looked as if it had recently served 
as a substitute for a hearth-broom. She had a fine 
bust, of which the beholder was advertised by a 
constant lack of hooks and eyes or buttons on 
the upper part of her dress. She was the sort of 
woman a shy man would have shunned to go abroad 
with on a windy day for fear of seeing every stitch 
of clothing blown off her. She had two children, a 
little girl of three, as beautiful as a baby angel, and 
a noble little boy of five. When I first made their 
acquaintance, at four o'clock p.m. of a nipping day 
in early spring, they were making mud-pies in the 
middle of the horse-road in their nightgowns. The 
house was of a piece with its inhabitants. There 
was a common red-legged deal kitchen-table in 
the drawing-room, and a handsome sculptured 



80 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

oak ditto in the kitchen, but as most of the 
cooking was done in the first-named apartment, 
that arrangement was really less eccentric than it 
might otherwise have seemed. There was a brass 
coal-scuttle on the hearthrug, but it was full of 
water, on which were floating the wrecks of some 
paper boats, and the coals were contained in 
Anatole's waste-paper basket. The room was full 
of smoke, owing to some defect in the chimney, 
and the window by which it escaped — which was 
broken — was propped open by a handsomely framed 
engraving of Meissonier's picture, " La Rixe." To 
have used any article merely for the purpose for 
which the manufacturer had intended it would have 
seemed a pitiable subterfuge to the soaring genius 
of Madame Anatole. At her hospitable board I 
have helped myself to butter from a coffee-cup and 
to salt from a soap-dish, and I have seen her, within 
the space of one minute, exact service as a paper- 
cutter and a toothpick from an insignificant bit of 
metal which the ordinary woman would have re- 
garded only as a hair-pin. I have seen her stir a 
potful of soup, boiling on the drawing-room fire, 
with a shoe-horn, and I have eaten my share of 
that same soup out of a pie-dish, what time the 
maid-of-all-work was sent out to fetch a quart of 
bitter beer from the neighbouring public-house in 
a celery-glass. Just as Anatole was occasionally 
assailed by passing spasms of industry, Madame 
would be suddenly inspired to dress herself with 
more or less propriety, and I met her one afternoon 
in Regent Street so beautifully got up that you 
might have taken her for a Duchess, if only her 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 81 

gloves had been of the same colour and she hadn't 
been eating a banana. 

Not long after my introduction to this quaint 
and delightful household Anatole's mother died, 
and he mourned her with the passionate regret 
natural to an affectionate heart belonsfinof to so 
typical a Frenchman. She had left him a little 
hoard of ready money, which went to the winds in 
no time, and several personal mementoes, which he 
clung to ardently, and only parted with at the pinch 
of dire necessity. Among them was a collection of 
Sevres and Dresden china figures, of which sort 
of bric-a-brac the old lady had been an admirable 
judge. Whereby hangs a tale. The Parisian 
journal had given Anatole the sack, the only 
wonder about that being that he had not received 
it months earlier. The sluttish plenty in which his 
regular salary and the windfall of his mother's 
legacy had enabled him and Madame Anatole to 
live was seriously curtailed before he could make up 
his mind to part with any relic of " la mere," but 
needs must, and one morning he came into Town 
with a beautiful little Louis Quinze shepherdess in 
his pocket. He took it to a famous pawnbroker's 
establishment in the Strand, and laid it on the 
counter. " How much ? " asked the clerk. " Three 
pounds," replied Anatole. The clerk, who was the 
mere average cockney, and no judge of any kind of 
object of art, thought Anatole was " guying " him, 
and declined to consider the proposition. "If you 
don't know your business," said Anatole, " ask 

Mr. ," naming the head of the establishment. 

Mr. being called, examined the statuette and 

G 



82 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

ordered the clerk to make out the ticket at the sum 
demanded. The rest of the pretty little figures 
speedily followed in the same direction, and after 
several squabbles, all ended by the personally 

delivered verdict of Mr. , it at last got beaten 

into the clerk's head that the insignificant little 
articles proffered from time to time by the " furrin 
gent " were really valuable. Then came the day 
on which the last of the cherished relics of maternal 
affection had followed the rest, and the money, save 
one solitary sixpence, had all been spent. Anatole 
and I were wandering disconsolate along the 
Strand, when we came to a shop — it stood almost 
exactly opposite the great pawnbroking establish- 
ment — which had its window full of all sorts of 
trumpery trifles, with a card bearing in large letters 
the legend, " All at 6^." Anatole's eye dwelt, 
vacantly wistful, on this inscription, and immediately 
lightened with a flash of genius. " Nom de noin de 
nom de nom de Dieu, mon amiy quelle inspiration ! 
Viens done ! " He plunged into the shop, selected 
from among the heterogeneous trash on the counter 
the least shapeless lump of porcelain, daubed with 
the least hideously discordant colours, and paid his 
sixpence. Then he darted across the street, dis- 
appeared into the pawnshop, and emerged radiant 
two minutes later. " How much ? " I asked, faint 
with admiration of his splendid audacity. " Three 
pounds," he answered. It is a terrible confession, no 
doubt, but it is a fact that I made myself particeps 
eriminis to this particularly impudent specimen of 
the confidence trick to the extent of lunching on 
the proceeds of the fraud. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 83 

Anatole's end was as tragic as his life was merry. 
He went out to the States as acting-manager of a 
troupe of French comedians, and for a time I heard 
of him now and then as doing extremely well, and 
at last as running a company of his own in a piece 
of his own writing. Then he vanished altogether 
from my ken, and many years passed before I again 
heard his name. He had wandered to some semi- 
civilised region of California, and had somehow fallen 
into desperate feud with a well-known dangerous 
character who publicly proclaimed his intention 
of "finishing" him on the earliest opportunity. 
Anatole was not a man to be easily frightened. He 
had proved his contempt of death in fashions which 
had won him more than one military decoration dur- 
ing the Franco-German War of 1870. He bought 
a revolver, and, save for that precaution, took no 
overt note of his enemy's threats. They came face 
to face one night unexpectedly in a saloon. The 
enemy drew his pistol, Anatole drew his ; they fired 
simultaneously, and fell dead each across the body 
of the other. 

It was at some time about this period that a 
certain sombre little incident, of which I have often 
thought since, and which I shall never forget, 
occurred. It was the depth of a severe winter, 
not long before the New Year. I had taken a 
room on the ground-floor of a house situated in one 
of the innumerable shabby streets off the eastern 
side of Tottenham Court Road. The house was 
full of other lodgers of whom I knew nothing, and 
saw almost as little, the basement was tenanted by 



84 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

the landlord and his wife. The former was a huge 
giant of a man, standing well over six feet in height, 
a veritable colossus, with a face hard as if hewn out 
of granite, and with one unchanging expression, of 
a sort of cold and bitter rage against things in 
general. His wife was a timid, shrinking, almost 
voiceless creature, who glided about the house like 
a shadow. My stay under their roof was a very 
brief one, but it was long enough for me to learn 
that their strongest idiosyncrasy — or rather his, 
for the woman had no proper existence of her own, 
and was merely a dumb echo of her husband, if the 
phrase be permissible- — was a sour, narrow, fierce 
religiosity. There was a Baptist chapel near at 
hand, of which they were constant attendants, and 
whose minister was their frequent visitor. Every 
night and morning the floor of my room used to 
shake in harmony with a continuous, hollow, thun- 
derous growl, in which the giant poured out his 
matinal and nocturnal supplications at what he 
probably called the Throne of Grace, tenanted, I 
fear, by some Being as ungracious as ever lent 
ear to the petitions of a South Sea islander or a 
Calvinist Scot. 

I had been in the house about a month when, 
towards two o'clock one morning, I was making my 
way homeward through as heavy a snowstorm as 
ever fell on London. The soundless streets were 
muffled to deadest silence, and the huge, persistent 
flakes were so thick that they blotted out the gas- 
lamps at only a few yards distance. As I came to 
the corner of the street in which I lived I almost 
ran against the figure of a woman standing there. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 85 



She was as moveless, and as white from head 
to foot, as the pillar of salt which had once 
been Lot's wife; and Lot's wife herself, standing 
alone in the desert after her transformation, could 
hardly have looked more forlorn or desolate. 
She started so violently at my appearance that 
the flakes with which she was coated made a sort 
of miniature snowstorm of their own about her. 
I murmured a word of apology, and had made a 
dozen steps upon my homeward way when I was 
arrested by the woman's voice. " Sir, oh, sir ! " 
Few as the words were there was a world of 
meaning in them, and in the desperate, eager gasp 
in which they were spoken, and I knew that they 
had risen many times to her lips that night before 
they had at last got themselves addressed to me. 
Conversation in such conditions is apt to be brief, 
pregnant, and to the point. The woman was there 
in the deserted street and in that blinding snow- 
storm because she had nowhere else to go. She 
had been very ill, she said, and she might have 
spoken in the actual tense, as the pinched cheeks, 
the unnaturally bright eyes, ringed with bistrous 
circles, and the raucous, broken voice, all went to 
prove. I had no money about me, and even had I 
possessed any, of what immediate use could it have 
been ? But I remembered that I had in a cupboard 
in my room part of a tin of corned beef, a fragment 
of a loaf, and a bottle of beer. I told her the 
condition of affairs, and after a moment's hesitation 
she decided to accompany me. I opened the door 
of the house with my latchkey, and she followed me 
into my room, treading so lightly, at my whispered 



86 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

request, that I was scarcely conscious of her 
presence. I spread the simple viands before her, 
and she attacked them with the very rage of hunger. 
As I watched her, I heard the thunderous murmur 
of the landlord's voice below, and stepping quickly 
to the door locked it as quietly as I could. As I 
turned again towards my guest, I saw in her face a 
most horrible and abject fear, a fear which had 
swallowed up fatigue, hunger, and all other name- 
able sensations. A muffled, heavy tread came up 
the wooden stairs leading from the basement, and 
I could see the girl's heart beating with frantic 
terror as the steps approached — her body shaking 
with short, sharp vibrations. The door was tried, 
an^ of course resisted. " Who's in there with 
you ? " asked the landlord's voice, and the stricken 
figure in the chair beside the table seemed to 
shrink in stature at the vibrant, menacing sound. 
I replied that I was alone. " You're a liar," the 
voice throbbed back to me. " You've got a woman 
with you. Open the door, or I'll break it in." 
The woman's aspect was abject beyond all language 
to describe, and I was not free of fear on my own 
account, for the huge man could have broken me 
like a biscuit. I made no answer, and with no 
more ado he set his shoulder to the panel. The 
flimsy lock broke at the pressure, and the landlord 
stalked into the room. His gaze fell upon the 
woman, and he stopped short. How long, as he 
stood and she sat, both still as figures of carven 
stone, their eyes dwelt on each other, his with their 
unchanging, damnatory scowl, hers with a world of 
terror and amazement and supplication in them, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 87 

I do not know. There are brief flashes of time 
which seem to fill eternity. Without a word, he 
raised his hand and waved her to the door. With- 
out a word she rose and obeyed the gesture, 
passing him with bent head. He followed. I 
heard the quick flutter of her feet and his massive 
tread pass along the hall. The door opened and 
closed. The heavy tread returned alone, passed 
my room, and descended the stairs. And there 
the story ends. I left the house that morning, and 
have never since set foot in the street in which it 
stands. 

In that part of the Strand, now demolished, 
upon which abuts the southern end of Kingsway, 
stood a little tavern known as the " Spotted Dog." 
At the back of the ground-floor was a small, ill-lit, 
ill-ventilated room, where, originally on Saturday 
afternoons and later on most evenings of the week, 
a little society of people, mostly journalists, used to 
come together to talk and smoke. The little band 
did not, at the moment, include anybody of especial 
importance, but a rather infrequent visitor there has 
since become a very great personage indeed. He 
was a slim-built, eager-looking, quick-eyed, hand- 
some young fellow, who answered to the name of 
Alfred Harms worth. My acquaintance with him 
was only of the slightest, and did not last long, but 
three-and-twenty years later, when he had become 
a multi-millionaire, a peer of the realm, and the 
proprietor of innumerable newspapers, and I was 
very glad to accept a berth as journalistic odd-job 
man on the Daily Mirror^ we met again, and had 



88 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

a long hour's talk over our common reminiscences. 
Having eaten his bread for nearly two years — for 
which, however, I hope I gave a fair and sufficient 
equivalent in work done — and being able to bear 
testimony — as I gladly do — that his marvellous 
success has left him as modest and frank a 
companion as I ever spent an hour's talk withal, 
it is with some reluctance that I enter on the 
expression of my views regarding him as what he 
verily is — one of the most potent living influences 
of the day. In his public capacity I believe him 
to be the incarnation of an evil already great, and 
one which threatens to develop into as serious 
a menace to the commonweal as has been seen in 
England since we kicked James the Second across 
the Straits of Dover. In exactly how many news- 
papers he holds a paramount interest I do not 
know. I have heard the number stated as high as 
fifty. That is very likely an exaggeration, but it is 
pretty certain that, if it be so, the exaggeration is 
merely prophetic. A man in the prime of life, 
gifted with his ambitious and acquisitive tempera- 
ment and his business genius, and backed by the 
capital Lord Northcliffe is able to command, will 
very certainly not be content to rest and be thankful 
after the feats of conquest he has already performed. 
It is matter of common knowledge that he is the 
sole proprietor or the dominant power of several 
London daily and weekly journals, including the 
Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the 
Globe, the Evening News, the Observer, the Weekly 
Dispatch, and the World, not to mention such 
(intellectually) negligible little sheets as Answers, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 89 

Home Chat, and the like ; and that his mandate is 
law in the editorial offices of a large number of 
locally-important provincial papers. It will certainly 
be no great exaggeration to say that Lord North- 
cliffe can control the utterance of twenty journals 
of wide circulation, and consequently of considerable 
authority. When one says that it is of common 
knowledge that he wields so enormous a power, the 
statement must be understood as subject to a vast 
reservation. The common knowledge extends only 
to journalistic, political, and financial circles, which 
means that it is matter of common ignorance to 
at least ninety-five per cent, of the population in 
general. That means that any item of the great 
bulk of the British public might find repeated in 
a dozen or a score of apparently individual and 
independent newspapers identically the same 
opinion, differing only in its verbal expression, on 
any subject of vital importance which might be 
occupying the public attention at a given moment. 
If it be urged that the majority of people read only 
one newspaper — which is true — it may be pointed 
out in rejoinder — and this is equally true — that the 
great majority of that majority implicitly adopt the 
political and sociological views urged by the one 
journal they read. The number of people who 
think so or so regarding public questions because 
the Times, the Telegraph, or the Standard says so 
or so is enormous, and that one man should be able 
to convert a score of journals into a poly-megaphone 
for the blaring forth of his individual opinion over 
the entire face of England is a grave public danger. 
It is no less than a contradiction of the vital 



90 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

principle on which the only possible utility of a 
public Press to the community can be based. I am 
not, and never could have been, an expert on the 
business side of journalism, and for a man who has 
passed so much of his life in and about newspaper 
offices, I am absurdly ignorant of recent journalistic 
developments. But such common-sense and such 
knowledge of commercial history as I possess are 
sufficient to convince me of the frightful peril to 
which the free expression of free thought in 
England is exposed by the success of Lord North- 
cliffe's line of campaign. I take it for granted that 
that success will have the inevitable result of all 
similar successes, that other men possessing a larger 
or smaller modicum of his genius and temperament 
will imitate his methods, that other corporations 
similar to that he controls will arise, that, after 
passing through a prefatory period of internecine 
warfare, they will combine for their common interest, 
and that in a very few years from now the entire 
Press of Great Britain will be merely the mouth- 
piece of a handful of colossal capitalists, who will 
dictate to the nation, with none to say them nay, 
on every conceivable subject, from the tremendous 
choice of peace or war with other Powers to the 
price of the morning egg and rasher. That such 
a corporation would wield its power in the interest 
of the nation, or in any interest but its own, is an 
inconceivability I shall waste no time in discussing, 
since I am not writing this book in order to insult 
the common-sense of my readers. When Henry 
Thomas Buckle said that the only possible means 
of preventing any man, or body of men, from 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 91 

abusing power, was to prevent them from acquiring 
power, he uttered one of the few absolute and 
unshakeable verities regarding human nature that 
have ever been put on paper. I find myself here 
in the position of a doctor whose skill, sufficient to 
diagnose a malady, is incompetent to prescribe the 
remedy. But about my diagnosis I am absolutely 
certain. Another twenty years of uncontrolled 
exploitation of the Press on the lines followed by 
Lord Northcliffe will deliver the British Empire 
hand and foot, body and soul, to the tender mercies 
of a journalistic Trust, will make our Sovereign its 
powerless pensioner, our Lords and Commons the 
registrars of its ipse dixity and our proletariat a flock 
of sheep to be fleeced and flayed at its sweet will. 

(I am not writing this book on any fixed plan. 
Reminiscences and reflections will fall upon the 
page pretty much in the order in which they occur to 
me, with no necessary relation to each other in the 
matter of chronological arrangement, an adjustment 
which will, I believe, give them a characteristic 
value higher than that to be attained by presenting 
them in a less arbitrary order. As Anthony 
Hamilton says in his " Memoires de Grammont," 
it is of little importance with what feature of a face 
a painter may begin if only the portrait, when com- 
pleted, is a recognisable likeness of the subject who 
sat for it. Such a method as I propose, carried out 
in relation to a career so broken as my own, may 
even not be without its biographical value.) 

During most part of the four or five years from 



92 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

which the foregoing reminiscences are culled, my 
staple income had been derived from the Sporting 
Life, on the staff of which journal I had been 
enrolled as dramatic critic through the introduction 
of my old friend, Byron Webber, now retired from 
the bustle of active journalistic life. He belonged 
to a school of publicists now rapidly vanishing. 
He was an all-round man, who touched life at many 
points, and so fully that it was something of a 
wonder how he had managed to acquire so much 
information of so many and so divergent kinds. 
His knowledge of English literature was both 
wide and deep, he was an excellent critic of painting 
and sculpture, a really learned virtuoso in furniture, 
china, and domestic art generally, an encyclopaedia 
of first-hand information regarding pretty nearly 
every form of sport, and a living history of the 
English theatre for many years past. 

The first year of my time as a dramatic critic 
was signalised by the phenomenon remembered in 
theatrical circles as " the Matinee Rush." A quite 
wonderful number of amateur playwrights produced 
pieces at afternoon shows, given mainly at the 
theatres in the Strand, and especially at the Gaiety. 
I remember one week in especial, during which I 
witnessed more or less of seventeen different 
performances. Of all the pieces so produced 
I recollect only one which found its way into 
the regular evening bill, a really funny farce by 
the late Joseph Derrick, entitled Cofifusiofi, but the 
London stage was enriched to the extent of one 
actor and one actress of genuine value. Alice 
Lingard appeared one afternoon at the Gaiety in 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 93 

" Adrienne Lecouvreur." The day was stiflingly 
hot, and the curtain rose before a mere scattered 
handful of spectators. When it rose a second time 
the audience had markedly increased in number, and 
at its final fall the house was very fairly full. People 
had gone out in the intervals and brought in other 
people, and the result was that, a month or two 
later. Miss Lingard appeared at the Globe in the 
leading female part of Sidney Grundy's brilliant 
comedy The Glass of Fashion^ under the manage- 
ment of Messrs. Hollingsheadand Shine, and there- 
after until her death maintained a prominent place 
amonof London actresses. The actor who was 
made by the Matinee Rush was Mr. Beerbohm 
Tree, whom I seem to remember as having played 
in all the afternoon shows of the time — a physical 
impossibility. But at that time Mr. Tree, like 
Ariel, seemed "to divide, and burn in many places." 
How he managed even to acquire the words of so 
many parts, to say nothing of investing each part 
he played — most of them poor, trashy, amateur 
attempts at characterisation — with some semblance 
of life and individuality, was in its way something 
of a miracle. He, too, was given his first real 
metropolitan chance in The Glass of Fashion, and 
Prince Perowski was the first item of that long 
gallery of masterly character studies on which his 
fame reposes. 

The life of a dramatic critic, when once the 
novelty of the business has worn off, entails a good 
deal of rather disgustful drudgery, but I remember 
my experience in that capacity with pleasure as a 
whole. It is a purple patch in the fabric of one's 



94 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

artistic life to have seen Salvini, incomparably the 
greatest histrionic artist of his day, with whose 
retirement from the stage Tragedy died out of 
the European theatre. No other living actor will 
ever tempt me from my fireside to see him in 
certain pieces in which I saw Salvini — Othello^ 
King Lear, La Morte Civile, or The Gladiator. 
In the gifts of fire and animation, the Mounet- 
Sully of twenty years ago and the Lewis Waller 
of the present day may be said occasionally, in 
their most inspired moments, to have approached 
him, but the Titanic massiveness and grandeur of 
his general style, the literally frightful, paroxysmal 
quality of his moments of anger or despair, were 
as far beyond emulation as they are beyond descrip- 
tion. He was the only actor I have ever seen who 
had, for long moments together, the power to 
abolish the footlights, to inspire me to actual for- 
getfulness of my physical surroundings, with the 
sentiment of the scene he played, and that in 
spite of the fact that I am but very indifferently 
acquainted with the language in which he acted. 
Language ceased to matter when Salvini crossed 
the stage. Soul spoke to soul, unimpeded by any 
such petty, accidental barrier. 

It is time, my reader may perhaps begin to 
think, that I came to Hecuba, and entered upon 
the history of my professional misfortunes, about 
which I made so big a brag in the opening para- 
graph of this book. My merely literary woes 
began when I was four-and-twenty. I was living 
in the village of Rochefort, in the Belgian Ardenne, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 95 

with my brother Christie, acting as his amanuensis. 
A month or two earlier, in London, I had begun 
a novel, and I continued to work at it in the 
intervals of writing at Christie's dictation. It was 
entitled ** Fooled by Fate," and it contained certain 
incidents which, with my consent, were afterwards 
embedded in my brother's novel, " Cynic Fortune." 
When I had finished it, I sent it — unregistered, 
which was foolish — to an English firm with a big 
connection in the story-syndicating line of business. 
When a month had elapsed without a word of 
acknowledgment from the firm in question I wrote 
a shy little note asking when I might hope to know 
their verdict. I received a prompt reply to the 
effect that no such volume had reached them. 
And that was the last I ever heard of it. I do 
not, looking back on what I can remember of the 
book, think that the intellectual wealth of the world 
was much diminished by the loss of " Fooled by 
Fate." But it had cost me some six months of 
hard and conscientious labour, the silly dreams of 
fame and fortune I had known while writing it 
had been very sweet to me, and their brusque 
evanishment left my life a little bleak and colourless 
for a time. 

For quite a while after this misadventure, things 
went well with me. I wrote a second novel, 
" Monkey Mephisto," which was published by 
Messrs. Dicks ^as a Christmas Number, and it 
brought me my first and only commission, which 
I fulfilled by writing "A Game of Bluff," published 
in serial in the Penny Illustrated Paper, and sub- 
sequently in book form by Messrs. Chatto & Windus. 



96 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

I got fair prices and even some small kudos for 
these books, and began to think myself on my 
way to become some day something of a personage. 
Wherein I was as one deceived, and the truth was 
not in me. 

I began to take myself seriously — always a 
ludicrous mistake for any writer who is less than 
a man of indubitable genius. I had always had a 
high and grave appreciation of the literary craft, 
and had never regarded my first books as anything 
more than educational exercises in the great art I 
tremulously hoped one day to practise worthily. 
While I was writing the last chapters of " A Game 
of Bluff," I conceived the idea of a story I at first 
entitled " A Page of Life," afterwards — long after- 
wards — given to the world as " A Song of Sixpence." 
Elderly people who write, or who have written, 
will need no stale and tedious reminder of the 
sensations, so intense, so bewildering, so inspiring, 
so terrifying, which accompany the gestation of 
their first Great Book. I sometimes wonder if 
the first perception of the quickening of the actual 
flesh-and-blood baby in the mother's womb can be 
a more wonderful experience. 

Christie and I had wandered to Paris. It was 
the winter of 1886 — the severest winter, I have 
heard many people say, since that of LAnnee 
Terrible. Christie — as was frequently the case 
with him — was behindhand with his work, and we 
were slaving double tides to make up for lost time. 
He composed with marvellous rapidity and fluency, 
and for some weeks I set on paper to his dictation a 
daily average of five thousand words. That, in itself. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 97 

would have been no bad day's work, but when 
it was done, and Christie was recreating himself 
at the cafe or the theatre, I was sitting in my room, 
grinding out, with a slow laboriousness in pathetic 
contrast with his dexterous rapidity, the pages of 
" A Song of Sixpence." By what strange process 
of cerebration such a feat was feasible I cannot 
say, but I know that, while my fingers were often 
taxed to keep pace with my brother's fluent tongue, 
and while one half my brain was keenly watching 
and admiring what my fingers wrote, the other half 
was elaborating touches of character and turns of 
phrase to be duly set down in my solitary labour 
later on. I know that, when, night after night I 
stumbled, drunk with fatigue, into bed, the two sets 
of imaginary people and the widely divergent worlds 
in which they moved got themselves mixed up in 
an imbecile and exasperating jumble which made 
sleep a sort of ludicrous terror. I know that night 
after night I left that unrestful slumber, to sit in 
night-shirt and dressing-gown, with a foot of snow 
on the window-sill outside, and to beat and blow 
my chilled blue fingers to some faint consciousness 
of the pen between them. I claim so much credit 
in connection with that miserable book, doomed to 
cost me months of hope deferred and bitter dis- 
appointment, that it was written with a level passion 
of resolute endeavour to touch the high-water mark 
of all that 1 was then capable of in human know- 
ledge and human sympathy and in artistry of 
achievement. And I would willingly go through all, 
and more than, the pain it was destined to cause 
me, to hear hearty, kindly George Sims say of 

H 



98 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

another book, as he said of " A Song of Sixpence," 
that it was " the best bit of work he had read for 
years ; " to hsten to the words of praise it drew 
from great-hearted Robert Buchanan, the best and 
dearest friend I ever had ; or to read, written 
by the hand which had given the world " Richard 
Feverel " and " Beauchamp's Career," that " in 
George Murdoch I had created one of the few 
living, breathing men in modern fiction." 

For it did get pubhshed at last, three years and 
nine months after, in a white-walled villa perched on 
the heights of Montboron, with the salt smell of the 
Mediterranean piercing the heavy odours of rose 
and eucalyptus, and the lights of the Promenade des 
Anglais twinkling along the Baie des Anges — a 
wonderful change from sleet-riddled Paris — I laid 
down my pen beside the final page of the manu- 
script. I have never had any satisfactory assurance 
that the sexual morality of England has shown 
any marked decline since it appeared, but no fewer 
than six-and-thirty publishers, moved by patriotic 
dread of that result, refused to father it. Six- 
and-thirty robust, well-nourished men shook and 
paled over that poor little bundle of manuscript. 
One of them read it three times and three times 
recoiled from the dread responsibility. "Why?" 
I asked in ever-growing wonder, and I ask it 
still. One of the primmest old ladies I ever 
knew, a very dragon of all the proprieties, said 
to me regarding it, in her quaint, quavering old 
voice, " I'm afraid you are not a good man, Mr. 
Murray, but you have written a very good book." 
I have had letters from people whose faces I never 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 99 

saw, thanking me for having written " A Song of 
Sixpence." I have never heard an unfriendly word 
about it from man or woman. It was published 
nineteen years ago, and it is selling still, and I got 
ten pounds for it, and shall never see another 
penny. I was glad enough to get that, or anything 
at all, for it, and had offered it to half a score of 
publishers as a free gift. 

A circumstance which, perhaps, partially ex- 
plained this cold reception of my literary bantling 
was that, about this time, a clique of sexless 
simpletons known as the National Vigilance Com- 
mittee had prosecuted Mr. Henry Vizitelly for 
publishing much-Bowdlerised versions of some of 
Zola's ** Rougon-Macquart " series, and had suc- 
ceeded in sending the veteran publisher and publicist 
to prison for twelve months. Still, novels much 
more questionable, both in incident and phraseology, 
than " A Song of Sixpence " were appearing with 
the imprimatur of London houses. When Chatto 
& Windus at last made up their minds to publish 
my book, they insisted on one excision. I had 
spoken of " those members of the Sorrowful Sister- 
hood who haunt the purlieus of the midnight 
Haymarket." That not very rampant indecency 
was ruthlessly suppressed, and from that fact the 
reader who does not know " A Song of Sixpence " 
may get a fair idea of its verbal chastity or coarse- 
ness. I had, in fact, written the book with what I 
thought — and think — an excess of reticence. And, 
while it was still passing from hand to hand, a firm 
which had shudderingly declined to publish it 
brought out another novel, from which I cull one 



100 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

phrase, with sincere apologies for inflicting on my 
readers anything so nasty. It describes the odours 
of the ladies present at a ball, ending up with 
" the stench, deep as the pedal-notes of an organ, 
exhaled by the armpits of a corpulent dowager." 
As I am a living man, the firm which declined to 
publish me, published that ! I do not, and I will 
not, believe that any circumstance at once so galling, 
so futile, and so ludicrous, has ever happened to any 
other man who has ever held a pen. I remember 
telling James Whistler about it, and I shall never 
forget his shriek of eldritch laughter nor the 
characteristic comment which followed. " By gad, 
sir, such a fool as that's wasted as a publisher. He 
ought to have been an art critic. What ! " 

Apropos of Whistler, let me set down here a 
droll incident in which the great little artist was 
concerned. Sitting one morning at breakfast in 
Paris, I read in the Figaro that the Luxembourg 
Gallery had acquired Whistler's famous " Portrait 
of his Mother." I determined to see it, and to 
utilise the luncheon hour for the purpose. Having 
no time to lose in wandering about the Gallery 
looking for the picture, I applied to one of the 
attendants. '* Vous avez ici," I said, " un tableau 
recemment acquis, le Portrait de sa Mere, par le 
peintre americain, M. Whistler." Much to my sur- 
prise, the functionary made me a low bow, and with 
every sign of the most respectful solicitude, begged 
me to do him the honour of accompanying him. 
He took me to the portrait, expressed a hope that 
I approved of the light and the place in which it 
was hung, and of the company in which it found 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 101 

itself upon the wall. Then I understood. The 
man had noted my foreign-sounding French, and 
had jumped to the conclusion that I was *' le peintre 
americain " in person. I said nothing to indurate 
that impression, but nothing to correct it, and on 
leaving the place gave him a five-franc piece. A 
little later I met Whistler in the Rue de Rivoli, and 
told him of the adventure. " Oh ! Eh ? What ? 
You are the confounded fellow, eh } Why, by 
gad, sir, when I went to the Gallery yesterday, 
they wouldn't believe I had painted my own 
picture ! " 

To return to my subject. I have suffered a 
good deal at the hands of publishers, but I bear so 
little malice that I will make them a present of a 
bit of wisdom, at which, had I never been spurred 
on to think on certain subjects by their dealings 
with me, I might never have arrived. A quelque- 
chose malheur est 6on. It is a sad fact that, as a 
class, they are more ignorant of their business than 
any other set of men I know or know of. They 
are the helpless slaves of a little set of superstitions 
and a little set of phrases. One of the most 
cherished of their superstitions, and the most 
fundamentally foolish of them all, is that there is 
in actual, objective existence a certain body which 
they call "the public." There is, as a matter of 
fact, no such body. There is, in its place, a quite 
innumerable lot of little bodies — the publics. There 
are, for instance, Mr. George Meredith's public and 
Miss Marie Corelli's public. There are Mr. J. M. 
Barrie's public and Mr. Jerome K. Jeromes public. 
There is a public which likes to laugh and a public 



102 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

that likes to cry, a public that welcomes thought 
and a public which shuns thought as the universal 
enemy shuns holy water. There is an already 
great, and rapidly growing public, which is quite 
emancipated from old-womanish terror of the new 
or the unusual in ethics and social philosophy, a 
public which is inclined rather to welcome original 
absurdities in those directions, if they are only 
cleverly expressed, than to turn from any serious 
experiment in morals or idea. There is — and 
perhaps always will be — a vast public which still 
thinks it wise to tell their children that they were 
found in wells and parsley beds, the sort of people 
for whose behoof, a few years ago, an edition of 
" David Copperfield," minus the episode of Steer- 
forth and Little Em'ly, expunged as " unfit for 
publication," was issued. There are points at 
which some of these different publics overlap, like 
the scales of a fish, but they are as absolutely 
distinct one from another, and, as bodies, they have 
no more inter-relation than the lovers of Wagner 
and Berlioz have with the admirers of the gentlemen 
who composed " Woa, Emma ! " or " Two Lovely 
Black Eyes." Every writer of talent has his public 
ready made, waiting and eager for him, whether he 
deals in tears or laughter, in thought or in horse- 
play, in idealism or in pickle-herring farce. To say 
to any author regarding any book, as was said to 
me by six-and-thirty different publishers regarding 
" A Song of Sixpence," " It's very clever, but the 
public does not want it," is to give utterance to as 
flat and foolish a contradiction in terms as was 
ever spoken by the lips of man. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 103 



I have sometimes wondered whether the institu- 
tion of a British Academy of Letters, for which 
Matthew Arnold pleaded so insistently, might not 
find its strongest justification in a direction regarding 
which Arnold found nothing to say. It might be 
within the power of such a body to render practically 
impossible such stupid outrages on liberty and 
thought as, for instance, the prosecution of Mr. 
Vizitelly, to which I have already alluded, and, by 
a timely protest, or even by its mere silence and 
inaction, rescue the publisher and the public from 
the fussy and incalculable action of cliques of well- 
intentioned but uncultured busybodies. It is simply 
because organised and drilled stupidity is stronger 
than scattered and leaderless intelligence that such 
corporations as the National Vigilance Society, which 
do not count in their membership one name respect- 
able in Letters or in Art, are able spasmodically to 
impose their Sunday-school morality on the nation, 
and — incidentally — to make England the laughing- 
stock of Europe. An ordinary police magistrate, 
however admirably he may discharge the general 
run of his duties — and the stipendiary magistrates 
of London are as valuable a set of public servants 
as is possessed by any city in the world — certainly 
does not form the ideal tribunal for the decision of 
what is or is not expedient in either Art or Litera- 
ture. This contention was proved to my mind 
pretty conclusively by the late Mr. Vaughan, of 
Bow Street (who sat in judgment on the Zola- 
Vizitelly business), in regard to Mr. Rudolf Blind's 
picture, " The World's Desire," prosecuted by one 
or other of our irresponsible Bumble-cum-Podsnap 



104 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

societies for the Propagation of Prurient Prudery. 
Mr. Blind was astute enough to call a body of 
expert witnesses, among whom figured the late 
Ford Madox Brown and Sir Alma Tadema, in his 
defence. Mr. Vaughan, in his summing up, said 
that, in his opinion, the picture stood condemned as 
immoral and indecent, but he did not see his way to 
impose that opinion against the contradictory view 
expressed by such authorities as the witnesses for 
the defence. It was the utterance of an honest 
man, but it reduced to absurdity the position in 
which Mr. Vaughan was placed by the law. It 
was a case for the decision of the Royal Academy, 
but that institution, having no legal status in the 
matter, uttered no word. The Academy had been 
silent also — to its indelible disgrace — in a much 
graver affair which had happened a year or two 
earlier. M. Garnier, a French artist of distinguished 
talent, had painted a gallery of over a hundred 
pictures illustrative of episodes from the adventures 
of the immortal Pantagruel, perhaps the most remark- 
able monument ever raised by the genius of a painter 
to the genius of a writer. The paintings, after 
attracting vast crowds in Paris, were transferred to 
London. Some dozen of them were selected as a 
casus belli between the National Vigilance Society 
and the exhibitors ; the day went against the latter, 
the pictures were ordered to be destoyed, and were 
only saved from that fate by an indignant remon- 
strance, delivered through the French Ambassador, 
from the Ministry of Fine Arts in Paris, England 
is surely the only country in Europe in which so 
ignobly stupid an affair would have been possible. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 105 

The national muddle-headedness regarding the 
question of morality in Art, and the culpable supine- 
ness of the men whose bounden duty it is to make 
Art respected — the men who have succeeded greatly 
in its practice — were illustrated with a quite curious 
completeness by the selection of the present Licensor 
of Plays, Mr. George Alexander Redford. At the 
time of his appointment I wrote to the Westminster 
Gazette a brief note, asking why, out of the forty 
odd million nobodies who compose the population 
of the British Islands, this especial person should 
have been chosen for such a post. The Westminster 
Gazette printed my query, but it passed unanswered 
— as I suppose, because it was unanswerable. Mr. 
Redford had, I am informed, spent a blameless 
youth in the occupation of passing sovereigns over 
a bank-counter in a copper shovel — an unquestion- 
ably benevolent but not conspicuously intellectual 
employment, and no more obviously " moral " than, 
for example, weighing cheese or cutting out trousers. 
Why such a person should have been installed as 
guardian of the dramatic proprieties is certainly 
something of a nut to crack. The introduction of 
Mr. Robert Harcourt's Theatres Bill, which pro- 
poses to transfer Mr. Redford's powers to the 
County Council, gives warrant for a hope that his 
official line may not stretch quite so far as Banquo's 
progeny, but I cannot say that that hope greatly 
comforts me. Legend tells us of a certain "old 
woman of Syracuse," who fervently prayed for the 
continued life of the Emperor Nero " lest the devil 
should reign after him." I feel myself rather in the 
position of that apocryphal old lady. I am strongly 



106 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



inclined to doubt whether the County Council will 
much better Mr. Redford's instruction in the post 
he occupies. I have never been able to see any 
possible use at all in such a post. I have never 
been able to understand why the freedom accorded 
for generations past to the man who puts his ideas 
into the form of a book or speaks them from the 
pulpit or the platform should be denied to him who 
prefers to express them in dialogue intended to be 
delivered from the stage. To me, it is as marvellous 
as it is disgusting — I can find no milder word — that 
men of the intellectual status of those who provide 
our drama should submit to so degrading a tutelage, 
whatever may be the form it takes. Such a tute- 
lage is an insult to every man and every woman 
who writes in English matter intended for publica- 
tion ; it is an especial insult to every man and every 
woman who treads the stage ; and they stamp the 
insult indelibly on their own foreheads so long as 
they fail in their plain human duty to resent it. 

It is not possible to compute how much England 
loses by the nullification of native talent and in 
the consideration of other cultured nations by this 
stupid cowardice on the part of her leading artists 
and literati. Let me here offer to anybody who 
cares to avail himself of it an easy opportunity for a 
bit of cheap sarcasm by recounting another of my 
own experiences. Six years ago I compiled a 
volume I entitled " The Pessimist's Birthday Book," 
to which I wrote a preface in the form of an essay 
on "The Necessity of Pessimism." The philosophy 
of the essay can be summed up in two sentences I 
proposed to print upon the title-page. The first is 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 107 

from the pen of M. Museux, and runs as follows : 
Le Pessimisnie progressiste, celui qui ne se contente 
pas de ddplorer le mat, mais poursuit P amelioration 
morale et sociale de ce qtd est, voila la philosophie 
fortijiante dont nous avons besoin en cette ipoque 
troubl^e. The second sentence is the work of the 
Rev. Mr. G. M. Kaufman : "It is a sensible remark 
of Malon's that our wisdom consists perhaps in 
thinking en Pessimiste, for the nature of things is 
cruel and bad, and to act en Optimiste^ for human 
intervention is efficacious for moral and social im- 
provement." In the course of the essay, I found 
it necessary to express my views regarding super- 
natural religion in general and Christianity in par- 
ticular, and I compared the last-named faith, greatly 
to its disadvantage, with Buddhism. After vainly 
offering the book to several publishers I induced a 
distinguished friend to forward the preface to the 
editor of a leading Review, who returned it to him 
with expressions of deep regret that he was unable 
to use it on account of the strength of its attack 
upon Christianity. Of the work, regarded merely 
as literature, he spoke in the most cordial terms. 
Now, I am not so unreasonable as to feel any ill- 
will against the editor in question. In common 
fairness I have to recognise the extremely ungrateful 
position in which he found himself. As a man of 
intelligence, with the intellectual prestige of his 
Review at heart, he naturally wanted to publish a 
piece of work of which he could speak in such 
terms. But as a man of business in a position of 
business trust it is his plain duty to consider the 
feelings of the shareholders he represents, and in a 



108 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

battle between such interests it needs no prophet to 
tell us which interest must win. But the question 
will intrude itself — how often will a thoughtful 
man so placed find himself in the course of any 
given twelve months in a precisely similar position, 
and how many thoughtful utterances regarding grave 
problems will he be forced to reject because of the 
pusillanimity of the power behind the editorial 
chair ? And the further question follows inevitably 
— how can a country in which discussion of social 
and religious questions is so hampered hope intel- 
lectually to compete with countries in which, as in 
France and Germany, it is inconceivable that any 
cleanly written expression of sane opinion on any 
nameable topic could be so boycotted ? I say 
deliberately that Englishmen of intelligence can 
find no task more worthy or more cryingly demand- 
ing their attention than to devise some means by 
which the brains of England can be emancipated 
from the intolerable bondage of the stupidest and 
least-cultured section of the English public. 

The hotel in which I invariably put up in Paris 
was a comfortable little hostelry situated between 
the Rue de Provence and the Place de I'Opera. 
It was kept by an old gentleman whom I will call 
M. Paulet, who was a good deal of a character. 
He was a remarkably handsome old man, and one 
of those people of whom Charles Lamb says that 
cleanliness seems in them something more than a 
mere absence of its opposite. He had the clean, 
pink-and-white complexion of a healthy baby, and 
a rich mass of pure white hair, which, like his 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 109 

moustache and the obsolete long whiskers he 
affected, shone like delicate filaments of frosted 
silver wire. On one occasion I accompanied him 
on a visit to the country. He was got up for the 
occasion in a suit of white duck, with a white linen 
hat and white shoes, and he sparkled so that it posi- 
tively hurt one's eyes to look at him. We went to 
visit an old friend of his, a M. Mauri, who had the 
reputation of being the best laugher in France. 
Fortune favoured him — and us — with an opportunity 
for him to exhibit his powers in that direction. 
M. Paulet was by way of being a naturalist, 
and, like Ingoldsby's Sir Thomas, he went footling 
about a weed-covered duck-pond in search of 
specimens, and fell in. He emerged a ludicrous 
object, with his hat, his long Dundreary whiskers, 
his handsome Roman nose, and every angle of the 
erst-spotless white ducks dripping strings of green 
slime. We set out for the house, and, turning a 
bend in the road, met M. Mauri face to face. The 
latter dropped on to a bank by the roadside as if he 
had been shot, and laughed, as Carlyle says con- 
cerning a similar performance of Herr Teufelsdroch, 
** like the neighing of all Tattersall's." He howled 
and yelled and screamed and bellowed and snorted, 
spouting laughter as a whale spouts water. M. 
Paulet stood calmly smiling till he had laughed 
himself to quiet, and then said, with a beautiful 
wave of the weed-bedraggled white hat, " Mauri, tu 
ris ? Te salutant ! " — which I thought as good a 
joke as could have been expected in the circum- 
stances. 

Paulet had, in early life, been a friend of Henri 



no A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

Murger, and he and the great poet-historiographer 
of Bohemia had once played the audacious trick of 
running together an unlicensed cafe, a freak which 
had cost them some months of exile, until the 
offended authorities could be " squared " by friends 
in high places. Another friend of his, and a one- 
time inmate of his hotel, was M. Belmontet, now 
long since forgotten, but at one time the laughing- 
stock of literary Europe in his self-imposed style of 
" le poete de I'Empire." M. Paulet promised me an 
introduction to this gentleman — a promise which, 
to my real regret, was never fulfilled. He seems 
to have been a quite mild and blameless person, 
whose brain had been turned — like that of many an 
abler man — by the success of Napoleon the Third's 
murderous coup d'etat. He expressed his admiration 
of his idol in what were probably the most execrable 
verses ever penned by mortal man, which he printed 
and sedulously distributed at his proper cost. The 
rumour that the Emperor had paid him a handsome 
yearly pension out of his private pocket on condition 
that he ceased those proceedings may have been 
merely a calumny, but may also conceivably have 
been the statement of a fact. To be cursed by 
Victor Hugo was bad, no doubt ; but to be blessed 
by Belmontet must have been even more painful to a 
man who, poor creature as he was in most respects, 
possessed real literary discrimination. Of the hun- 
dreds of lines of incredible balderdash of Belmontet's 
composition which M. Paulet repeated to me at odd 
times 1 remember only three. Two form the pero- 
ration of an Ode to the Emperor on the occasion 
of the opening of the Halles Centrales — " Le 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 111 

Ventre de Paris," as Zola called them — and ran 
thus — 

A 

" O peuple de Pans, que belles sont tes Halles ! 
Beni soit I'Empereur qui nous les fit Centrales ! " 

The third was, according to M. Paulet, the verse 
which won for its author the Imperial pension. It 
was the closing line of a poem inspired by the 
public rejoicings occasioned by the cessation of the 
Crimean War — 

'* Le vrai feu d' artifice est d'etre magnanime ! " 

I asked what was supposed to have been the 
amount of the pension which had induced the Poet 
of the Empire to desert his Muse. "On dit," said 
M. Paulet, with perfect gravity, "que c'etait un 
million par an. Mais, mon ami, si j'avais ete capable 
d'embeter Badinguet avec des vers comme 9a, ce 
n'est pas une telle mesquinerie qui m'aurait clou^ le 
bee." 

In Paulet the French stage had lost a comedian 
of exceptional power. He was a fun-maker of a 
curious type, and nothing but his really captivating 
personality and the genuine kindness of heart which 
no eccentricity could long obscure could have saved 
him from frequent assault and battery. On the 
first occasion on which I dined at his table he 
gave a specimen of his peculiar cast of humour. 
There was a staid, portly, prosperous-looking 
provincial gentleman present, whom I afterwards 
learned to be an avoui in good practice in a 
country town. M. Paulet offered him a dish of 
mushrooms, which he politely refused, saying that 



112 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

he did not like them. Paulet's face flushed red, 
and his steel-blue eyes flashed unspeakable wrath 
and contempt. " You do not like them ! " he 
thundered, in a voice like the clangour of a brazen 
gong. ** No ! the simple fruits of the patient earth, 
of the generous mother of us all, are not for such as 
you, whose senses are depraved and whose souls 
are spotted by such debaucheries as Nero and 
Commodus would have blushed to perpetrate ! Ah ! 
but I recognise you well, unworthy son of a desolate 
motherland, too-worthy representative of the gene- 
ration whose nameless and unheard-of vices brought 
upon our once great and glorious France the ruinous 
disasters of the year '70 ! " This, and a good deal 
more in the same Ercles' vein, he poured out upon 
the "amazed and indignant provincial, and he ended 
up his denunciation by a truly frightful prophetic 
picture of the poor gentleman's death upon the 
guillotine, with a vivid touch about the devil 
standing by to catch his soul at the moment it 
jumped out of his neck. Then, with an absolute 
change of manner, he said, addressing the rest of 
his astonished auditory, " I ought to say that this 
is the first time I have ever had the honour of 
beholding this gentleman, who makes me the effect 
of a most honest citizen and worthy person. A voire 
sanUy Monsieur." Madame Paulet, who was a 
woman of business, and did not approve of this 
fashion of addressing solvent and respectable clients, 
was fluent in apologies to the stranger and in angry 
objurgations of her husband's folly and rudeness. 
" Go, excellent but stupid female," replied Paulet, 
with placid dignity. " Monsieur and I are Great 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 113 

Souls, floating in an ether thou couldst not breathe, 
and we comprehend one another. Go, thou, boil 
thy pot, cherish thy children, and thank God for thy 
husband." And that same night the worthy pro- 
vincial, whom I came to know well, and who turned 
out to be a very good fellow indeed, took M. and 
Madame Paulet to the theatre, and to an excellent 
supper afterwards. 

In common with every other assortment of 
human beings I have ever intimately known, the 
society of M. Paulet's hotel was full of interest. 
There was a poor fellow who lived in the garret, 
and who, I fear, would not have lived even there 
long had M. Paulet been a less patient and kindly 
host. He called himself a journalist, and was one 
of the thousand rath of the artistic life who swarm 
in every great city. He wrote verse and fiction 
indomitably, but had never succeeded in getting 
any of his productions published, and the few francs 
a week he managed to scrape together came mainly 
from a small provincial journal for which he con- 
cocted a hash of Parisian small-talk culled from the 
columns of metropolitan newspapers. Shabby and 
half-starved and fireless, it was his lot to describe 
banquets at which he could never hope to sit, and 
fetes and premieres and flower-shows, an invitation 
to any one of which would probably have killed 
him with sheer amazement. To this poor fellow a 
curious little incident occurred. He was employed 
to make a fair copy of a mass of documents which 
had to be delivered at the Palais de Justice abso- 
lutely without fail at a certain hour on a certain 
morning. He toiled away at his task for a couple 

I 



114 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

of days on end, and then, feeling that he must 
either sleep or go mad, calculated how much — 
or rather, how little — repose he could afford to 
allow himself, and gave a few Ill-spared coppers to 
Celestin, the boots of the hotel, to wake him at a 
given moment. Celestin forgot the commission, 
and the poor devil slept the sleep of complete 
exhaustion until he awoke within an hour of the 
time at which the delivery of the documents was 
due. With tears and sobs of despair he reproached 
the careless youth, but, his eye falling on the table 
on which lay his work, he saw that It was finished. 
He had completed it in his sleep. 

Among the guests was one to whom I took a 
strong liking, an old Spanish gentleman, whose 
manner was beyond description winning and courtly. 
He had amassed a moderate competence in trade, 
and made no sort of pretence to be anything but 
what he was, but no grandee of his nation could 
have excelled the exquisite polish of his urbanity. 
He was universally liked, but all the same was 
regarded by most of his fellow-guests as something 
of a bore, Inasmuch as almost his only conver- 
sational topic was his son, who had succeeded him 
In his former business as a fruit merchant at Lima. 
Bets used to be made as to how long he would 
remain In the salle-a-manger or the salon without 
making mention of this son, as to how often he 
would mention him In a given time, and so on. 
The son fell ill. I do not know the cost of tele- 
graphing from Lima to Paris, but during the week 
or so after the old gentleman first knew of his son's 
indisposition a little fortune must have been spent 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 115 

on the bulletins which rained upon him from South 
America. He had just taken his seat at table 
one midday when one arrived. He made his 
accustomed little bend of apology to Madame 
Paulet, opened the missive, and fell an inert mass 
beside his chair. He was raised and carried to his 
bed, from which he never rose again. He was 
dead within a week. The telegram consisted of the 
four crude words, " Voire fils est morty M. Paulet 
read it out to the company, and curses loud and 
deep were showered upon the brutal blockhead 
who had despatched it. The incident was the 
occasion of an interesting little display of a certain 
type of French character. C— — , a basso singer, 
who shortly after appeared with great success at 
Covent Garden, a genuine typical Provengal, who 
seemed to have stepped out of the covers of one of 
Ernest Daudet's novels, was so affected that he 
sat undisguisedly weeping like a child. A fellow 
meridional, a jovial, noisy humorist, who was an 
avocat, burst into the room, full of a funny incident 
which had happened that morning in one of the 

Law Courts, and in another minute C , the 

tears yet glistening in his big black beard like dew 
upon a bramble bush, was shaking the roof and 
making the glasses ring with peal on peal of 
delighted laughter. 

It was immediately after the sale of my novel, 
"A Game of Bluff," that a series of events hap- 
pened which, as much as anything that has ever 
occurred to me, illustrated the arbitrary and incal- 
culable character of my luck. Christie and I 



116 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

established ourselves for a week or two at a certain 
popular resort on the coast of Normandy, in an 
hotel conducted by a plump, personable, kindly 
old French lady, Madame Bruix. Among our 
fellow-guests was a handsome young English girl, 
apparently about nineteen years of age. She in- 
terested me by more than one circumstance. She 
was quite alone, she never either received or wrote 
a letter, and every morning immediately after break- 
fast she disappeared for the entire day until the 
dinner-hour. The landlady was a good deal of a 
gossip, and one day, with no invitation at all on 
my part, entered on a resume of what she knew 
concerning her whom she called my " belle petite 
compatriote," to whom I shall henceforth refer as 
Miss Lucy March. Her history up to date had 
been unfortunate. She was the daughter of a 
once-flourishing professional man who had hope- 
lessly ruined his career in a fashion not necessary 
to rehearse here, and of a lady then in an asylum, 
whose mental derangement had been precipitated, 
if not wholly caused, by her husband's ill-treatment 
of her, followed by his public disgrace. Miss 
March had been born into the Anglican com- 
munion, but had 'verted to Rome. Her father 
had fled into hiding, nobody knew whither, and 
she was absolutely alone in the world, with a fast- 
melting capital of some few score pounds between 
herself and complete destitution. A friend had 
given her an introduction to the Mother-Superior 
of a convent in the neighbourhood, and it was 
there she passed the major part of each day, study- 
ing conventual life with the object of discovering 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 117 

whether she felt the vocation, and would be justified 
in joining the Sisterhood. 

Miss March and I became acquainted, and I 
fell into the habit of conducting her to and from 
the convent gate, and so, quite easily, to sharing 
her evening walks on the sea-shore. I was a few 
years her senior, and in the absence of any other 
possible confidant it was natural enough that she 
should sooner or later appeal for such sympathy 
and advice as I could give. I heard anew the 
details I had learned from Madame Bruix, and 
Miss March further confided to me the confession 
that every hour she passed in the convent revealed 
to her more clearly her utter unfitness for its 
discipline. She was almost at the end of her 
slender resources, she was painfully conscious of 
her unpreparedness to battle with the world, the 
future was growing every moment more and more 
terrible to contemplate — what could she do ? 

She was, as I have said, a handsome girl, of a 
rather striking and unusual type of dark beauty. 
She had a conspicuous gracefulness of movement 
and gesture, and a pleasing voice. I suggested the 
stage as a possible avenue to independent bread 
and cheese, and offered her an introduction to my 
friend Henry Herman, who was just on the point 
of leasing the Opera Comique for the production of 
an extravaganza. Miss March closed gladly with 
the proposal, and a day or two later returned to 
London furnished with the promised introduction. 
Herman, one of the kindest of men, engaged her 
as a member of the chorus, and, although at that 
moment by no means too well off, paid her double 



118 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

the usual salary. She wrote me a letter of thanks 
for my assistance, and Christie and myself shortly 
after migrating to Nice, for awhile I lost sight of 
her. Passing, a few months later, through the 
Norman watering-place, I heard of her again. 
Herman's extravaganza had failed to attract, but 
Herman, with his usual good-hearted loyalty, had 
found her another engagement elsewhere. Then 
she had fallen ill — so ill that she had received the 
viaticum, and had escaped death almost by a 
miracle. Business took me to London, and being 
there I called upon her. She had fallen into kind 
hands, and had almost completely recovered from 
her illness, but she was pathetically helpless and 
solitary. I had just sold my novel, " A Game of 
Bluff," my pocket was full of money and my heart 
full of hope, and the idea occurred to me — why not 
marry her ? I was no more in love with her than I 
had — and have — been with a hundred other pretty 
women, which, as things were destined to fall out, 
was fortunate for me, but I returned to Nice a 
fortnight later an engaged man, with the under- 
standing that Lucy was to join me there directly 
the purchase of her trousseau was completed. 
Meanwhile the priest of the church she attended in 
London undertook to procure for her from the then 
Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster — the great 
and noble Henry Edward Manning — the necessary 
dispensation enabling her to marry one outside the 
pale of the Catholic Church. 

The peculiar strangeness of the adventure 
beofan almost from the moment of her arrival at 
Nice. I met her at the station, took her to a 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 119 

neighbouring restaurant for luncheon, and, having 
seen her luggage mounted on a four-wheeled cab, 
gave the driver the address — that of the Convent 
du Cceur de Marie, on Montboron, to whose 
Superior Lucy bore an introduction from the 
Mother of a similar establishment in London. 
I remembered afterwards an undefinable air of 
humorous surprise on the face of our charioteer as 
he heard the direction, but at the moment thought 
nothing of it. The cab mounted the hill, and 
stopped after a journey of considerable length in 
front of a heap of charred and smoking ruins. I 
called to the driver to go on, to which he replied, 
" Mais nous sommes arrives, m'sieu. Voici le 
Convent du Coeur de Marie"! The convent had 
been burned to the ground the night before, 
and I now understood the cryptic amusement with 
which the jarvey had received my instructions. 
For the moment I was nonplussed. Then I asked 
the practical humorist if there was any other 
similar establishment in the neighbourhood. He 
replied, with Voltairean irreverence, that the moun- 
tain was pouilleuse with des boites de cette espece, 
I bade him drive to the nearest. He did so. My 
ring at the bell was answered by a black-garmented 
old recluse to whom I presented my card, begging 
her to transmit it to her Superior and to say that a 
young English lady in distressful circumstances had 
need of her counsel. After a brief absence the old 
nun returned, and conducted us through a beauti- 
fully kept garden, along a bleak stone hall, up a 
flight of bare stone steps, and into a stone-blind 
apartment, the door of which closed behind us with 



120 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

a most ghostly and ominous click. Lucy by this 
time was in a sort of suppressed hysterical condi- 
tion. Groping about in the black darkness I broke 
my shin on the edge of a chair, in which I placed 
her, administering such comfort as I could. The 
house was obviously a very old one, dating, I 
should fancy, from about the reign of Louis XIV. 
Perhaps it had not always been a retreat for holy 
women, but I could not help wondering how many 
years might have passed since the chill darkness 
of that stony cell had echoed with a lover's kiss. 
Something of the same sentiment was obviously 
in Lucy's mind also, for she gently repulsed me, 
murmuring in a rather stricken voice, " Please ! 
Please ! not here ! " I made out that the apart- 
ment was cut into two by a grille of strong iron 
bars. Having broken my other shin on a second 
chair, I sat upon it as the door opened in the further 
side of the room, admitting a faint grey ray of light. 
I heard a flutter of skirts, and then a voice — the 
most marvellously beautiful sound I have ever 
heard issue from human lips. Its effect in the cir- 
cumstances was indescribable — magical. It was as 
though the angel Israfel, "who hath the sweetest 
voice of all God's creatures," was speaking out of 
the thick darkness. I told this invisible seraph the 
condition of affairs, and the marvellous voice rang 
back in womanly pity of Mademoiselle's unfortunate 
plight. Emboldened by this, I ventured to ask if 
Madame la Superieure could receive Mademoiselle 
into her house, at least for the moment, until some 
permanent shelter could be found for her. Madame 
la Superieure was desolate, but the house, normally 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 121 

full, was now inconveniently crowded by the presence 
under its roof of certain of the luckless ladies 
whose asylum had been burned the night before. 
Would Madame then have the extreme kindness 
to suggest anything to be done in the circumstances ? 
Yes. Let me conduct Mademoiselle to the Hotel 
des Trois Couronnes, Bouvelard Massena, and 
say that she was sent thither by her recommenda- 
tion. The house was of a perfect respectability, 
much frequented by the clergy, and Mademoiselle 
would receive every care and attention and be as 
secure as under the wings of angels. And so, with 
the darkness ringing as from a chime of fairy bells 
with a sweet-toned benediction and a reminder to 
Lucy that she must make of her husband " un bon 
Catholique," we went out into the light of day. 

I took Lucy to the hotel so recommended, and 
she being tired-out by her long journey from London, 
left her for the night. In the morning I called upon 
her by appointment, and together we set out in 
search of le Pere Bonaventura, a rubicund, obese 
old gentleman who lived — mainly on chianti and 
snuff — at the top of a monumentally tall house on 
the fringe of the Old Town. Father Bonaventura 
had been warned of our coming by his colleague 
in London, the priest who had procured for us the 
dispensation from the Cardinal- Archbishop. He 
was a jolly old gentleman, with a moist eye, a 
pendulous lip, and a voice like the roar of a good- 
natured old lion. He settled himself in his capacious 
armchair, stuck a huge pair of horn-rimmed pince- 
nez on the extreme tip of a very prominent nose, 
set a fat, snuff-stained white hand on either knee, 



122 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

and said, in a mellow, thunderous voice that made 
the windows ring, " Aha ! Aha ! Voila deux belles 
personnes qui vont se marier ! " I produced the 
dispensation, which he read carefully and declared 
to be " parfaitement en regie." He then explained 
to me that I must procure and hand over ' to him 
properly attested copies of my birth certificate and 
my register of baptism, on receipt of which he 
would at once proceed to put things in train for 
our immediate marriage. Learning that Lucy was 
living at an hotel, he asked her if she would not 
prefer to carry out her original intention of going 
to a convent, and on her answering decidedly in 
the affirmative, undertook at once to order the 
transference of her luggage to a convent-school 
situated within an easy five minutes' walk of the 
Villa Colbert, where I resided. " Mademoiselle," 
he said, "would have the advantage of pious and 
discreet society of her own sex, and complete liberty 
to come and go between the hours of nine in the 
morning and ten at night." He also prophesied 
that I should soon become a worthy and devout 
son of the Church, "because," he said, with that 
beautiful mixture of kindliness and courtliness cha- 
racteristic of the good priest in his dealings with 
women, " it was not in human nature to resist 
Truth, when spoken by such a voice as that of 
Mademoiselle." 

Father Bonaventura was as good as his word ; 
and that night Lucy slept at the convent-school. 
I hate the idea of the conventual life as heartily as 
Thackeray himself, and, like him, think the moral 
and mental mutilation which is of its very essence 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 123 

as wicked and senseless as the physical cuttings and 
crimpings inflicted on themselves by the monks and 
fakirs of some Oriental forms of religious abomina- 
tion. But I must needs confess that I have never 
met a kindlier, nor, in their gentle way, a merrier 
company than the ladies of that establishment. 
Among their pupils were two or three hardly out 
of babyhood, the children of neighbouring families, 
and perhaps that companionship and the discharge 
of the maternal duties it entailed kept their hearts 
young and fresh. They swooped upon the " demoi- 
selle anglaise " like a little flock of benevolent 
vultures, and could not make enough of her nor 
do enough for her to express their superabundant 
sympathy and affection. Me they regarded as an 
altogether wonderful kind of wild-fowl, a sort of 
puzzling cross between a hero and a fiend. I was 
going to marry "cette chere petite dame," and in 
so far I was an altogether delightful and admirable 
personage ; but I was a heretic, and that made them 
shudder. I was probably the only specimen of 
that kind of animal they had ever inspected near 
at hand, and I am quite sure that they were rather 
surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, that I 
had neither horns nor a tail, and smelt of nothing 
more diabolic than cigarette smoke. 

In redemption of my promise to Father Bona- 
ventura I wrote to my eldest brother, who still 
lived in my native place, asking him to procure 
and forward to me the documents for which the 
good old priest had asked — my certificates of birth 
and baptism. He replied promptly, enclosing the 
first-named document, but giving me in the place 



124 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

of the second a piece of information of which until 
then I had been ignorant. I am, as I have already 
said, the youngest of my father's large family. Late 
in life, just before the moment of my birth, my 
father had become imbued with what seems to 
me the perfectly sensible idea that the baptism of 
infants is a mistake, and that it should be left to 
the judgment of the adult whether or not he 
shall receive that sacrament. I was so completely 
ignorant a pagan that I had not the faintest con- 
ception of what this privation would mean in the 
eyes of a Catholic. I went quite light-heartedly 
to Father Bonaventura, handed to him my certifi- 
cate of birth, and translated for his benefit the 
passage of my brother's letter conveying the in- 
formation I have just given to my readers. The 
effect was electrical. I have heard a fair amount 
of strong and picturesque language in my time, but 
the dramatic soliloquy in which the good old Father 
expressed his sense of the situation left anything 
of that kind in my experience before or since long 
miles behind. When he had exhausted his commi- 
natory vocabulary and his breath, I begged for an 
explanation. It was to the effect that not having 
received the sacrament of baptism, which is not 
merely a sacrament in itself, but the indispensable 
key to all the gifts and graces of Holy Church, I 
did not in the eye of Holy Church exist at all. 
The Pope himself could not marry me. Made- 
moiselle might, were such a criminal outrage on 
the part of so admirable a young lady even think- 
able, go through any travesty of marriage she 
chose in the presence of a civil authority, but 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 125 

such a performance would no more constitute a 
marriage in the sight ot any Catholic than if she 
were to walk out of the convent to share the home 
of the first man she n ^t in the street, and it would 
cut her off from all communion with the Church. 

This was a terrible condition of affairs. " What 
was to be done ? " : asked. Father Bonaventura 
explained that all ttiat could be done was to yield 
myself to the instructions of a qualified tutor in the 
mysteries of the Faith, to declare my adhesion to 
that Faith, and to supplicate admission to the 
Christian communil-/ by the one door of baptism. 

I am far from -esiring to shock the suscepti- 
bilities of any pious reader :'■. > whose hands these 
pages may fall, but it is unavoidable that I here 
make plain the position in which I found myself 
placed by this pre^r ounceme'M . I am, both tempera- 
mentally and o long and i) ature reflection, not 
merely an unbeliever in any form of supernatural 
religion, but a hr.ter of all such forms. Religious 
susceptibility i • -i note lacking from the keyboard 
of my temper; nent. I do not remember ever to 
have experiepi d the faintest thrill of religious 
emotion, and i /.^collect, at the age of six, or there- 
abouts, horrif; nTLy my motler by a statement to the 
effect that prayer was a sketr waste of time, because 
there was nobody to liste "> to it. I was led to that 
point-blank negation by early experience which 
made an indelible impress ; a upon my memory. I 
had been beaten for an offence of which I was 
innocent. It was a Sunday, and at chapel that 
morning the preacher had made use of the phrase, 
" Curse God and die." 1 had construed it as meaning 



126 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

that to curse God was to die, that so horrible an 
act was necessarily followed by instant annihilation. 
I had gone into the garden, and there, in a passion 
of indignant revolt, had clencl ed my hands, set my 
milk-teeth viciously together, ■\- d uttered the words, 
"Damn you, God Almigh y!" Nothing had 
happened, and I was probable- the most surprised 
person breathing on this pl.iiiet at that moment. 
From that instant ^o; many years thereafter I was 
a point-blank athei -: jut I had the common-sense 
to keep my convi j jhs to myself. Then, as I 
lived and read and i' ought, carie the unescapable 
doubt. I recognised 'St people- y^astly my superiors 
in natural intellige ■ ; and ac.quired knowledge 
believed what I rejected. I took to studying the 
religious apologists, ' "r I found no one among 
them, from Paley to L\ewman, who did not drive 
further into my brain the nail of unbelief which he 
was doing his clumsy best to extract. A man with 
four arms or four legs ,v . aid seei to me a scarcely 
more amazing creatur rhan th intelligent and 
cultured person one me. .. every do/ who professes 
his belief in the dogmas : t any form of supernatural 
religion. I do not que'^ i on the sincerity of such 
people. I do not questic i either their intelligence 
or their culture. But I have given up the attempt 
to understand their intellectual attitude, just as, if 
I read the words upon a printed page, I should 
renounce the effort to understand what might be 
meant by " a square circle," or " a triangular 
rhomboid." 

Actuated as I was — a -'^ am — by such senti- 
ments, I found the situatio; i in which my father's 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 127 

late-born common-sense had landed me anything but 
a happy one. I had to explain it to Lucy, and our 
interview was the most painful I have ever known. 
Father Bonaventura, of course, spoke of it to the 
Mother-Superior of the convent-school, and the 
Sisters, by reason both of their sex and their pro- 
fession, were deeply stirred, and spared no means in 
their power to persuade me to the end they desired. 
Lucy's position was, of course, vastly more painful 
than my own. After saying farewell to all her friends 
in London in the character of an immediately pro- 
spective bride it was an awkward business for the 
poor girl to return among them unmarried after all. 
She was of a singularly reticent and undemonstrative 
character, and to this day I do not know how much 
or how little personal affection she felt for me, but 
pride was a strong ingredient in her nature, and I 
know that she suffered greatly. More than once 
I found myself on the verge of electing to act out 
my part in what to me would have been merely 
and purely a revolting farce, to accept the course of 
religious instruction of which the good Father had 
spoken, to feign conversion and acquiescence, and 
to accept the rite of baptism. With a conviction 
on which I may not always have acted, but which is 
nevertheless as sincere and deep as any I possess, 
that straightforward honesty is the only possible 
road out of any conceivable dilemma, I rejected the 
temptation. Lucy owned that she thought me right 
in doing so. She made one final attempt to con- 
vert me. There was at that time a young priest 
preaching at a church in Nice who enjoyed a 
peculiar reputation both for personal sanctity and 



128 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

as a pulpit orator. I have no doubt that he 
deserved both parts of his reputation — there could 
be none that he merited the second. I had accom- 
panied Lucy to his church on the first Sunday- 
night she spent in Nice, and his discourse was one 
of the most remarkable efforts of human speech I 
have ever listened to. He was a gaunt, loose- 
limbed, ill-made man, with a face which in repose 
was singularly harsh and repellent, and a voice 
much more remarkable for power than for sweet- 
ness, but I do not think that anybody who listened 
to him thought of those defects after the first 
minute. He had a sort of daimonic energy, and 
attacked his chosen theme as a barbarian athlete 
fighting for life and liberty in the Roman amphi- 
theatre might have flung himself upon the gladiator 
set to slay him. Would I, Lucy asked, meet this 
priest and talk with him ? With absolutely no 
expectation of either profit or pleasure from the 
encounter, I consented. The interview lasted an 
hour or so, and during that time I do not think I 
spoke a hundred words. If absolute certainty of 
the truth of Catholic doctrine and fulgurant scorn of 
the blind and impious wretches who dared to doubt 
it could have shaken a mind which makes cold 
reason the final test of all things, I should have left 
his society a fervent believer. As things were I 
remained untouched, except by admiration of his 
sincerity and of the torrential eloquence with which 
he expressed it. A moment before we parted he 
went as suddenly quiet as he had previously grown 
excited. Would I, he asked me, give Faith a 
chance — ^just a chance — to assert itself in my heart ? 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 129 

Would I promise him to wear this for a whole 
year ? I could carry it round my neck, under my 
dress, and none would know that I wore it. 
" This " was a little oval tin medal, stamped with 
the image of a saint, and with some brief Latin 
inscription whose wording I have forgotten. I 
readily gave him the promise, and he hung the 
medal round my neck murmuring, " Ca se fera ! 
Ca se fera ! " shook hands with me, and went away. 
Lucy and I came to an arrangement which was 
perhaps as good as any possible in the circum- 
stances. We accorded each other a six months' 
common truce, to be spent on my part in con- 
sidering whether I could join the Church, and on 
hers whether she could renounce it. She returned 
to London. A little later I received a packet 
containing my letters, her engagement ring, a few 
trifles of jewelry I had given her, and nothing else. 
It had taken Providence six-and-twenty years 
to mature this little joke, but it came off quite 
successfully at last. 

I have outlived most of my enthusiasms by this 
time. Perhaps they were never very robust, and 
partook more or less of the general slackness of my 
character. But if I have ever been really in 
earnest about anything in my entire life, it was 
in my views on the religious question. I have 
certainly thought longer and more intensely on 
that and on its innumerable cognate themes than 
on any other of the serious problems which every 
thinking man born into the world must needs settle 
for himself. I have for many years past made it a 

K 



130 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

fixed habit to hold a sort of intellectual stock-taking 
from time to time, and to reconsider my position in 
regard to those questions. And it is many years 
since I have appreciably added to or deducted 
from the nett total of the result. In the final 
sentence of the last of the series of letters in which 
James Anthony Froude summed up the history 
and the results of the Oxford Counter- Reformation, 
he says of the Roman Church — " if an institution 
with such a history behind it is an exceptional 
instrument to bear witness to God's existence, if it 
be alone the voice through which He speaks to 
man, and makes known His nature and His will ; 
then the attempt to understand the world, and what 
goes on in it, had better be abandoned in despair." 
Those words are truer, perhaps, of the Roman 
Church than of any other religious community that 
has ever existed, but they apply — or so it seems to 
me — with more or less force to every other body 
which has ever based itself on the dogmas of super- 
natural religion. The Catholic Church has a bigger 
mass of wrong, cruelty, and oppression to answer 
for than any other religious body, no doubt, but 
there never has been any religious body which has 
not tortured and oppressed up to the full limits 
of any powers it was permitted to possess And 
this is natural, logical, inevitable, just, and right. 
For if I do really and veritably hold that I am 
the repository of a truth necessary to the eternal 
salvation of my brother man, I am a traitor and 
a coward if I do not persecute to death and 
beyond it any teacher of a rival faith. My position 
in such a case towards a teacher of a rival faith 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 131 

is the position an honest dweller on a dangerous 
shore holds towards a professional wrecker who 
purposely lights false fires to lure ships to destruc- 
tion ; or towards some insane or ignorant person 
whose signals, honestly meant, would have the 
same disastrous results. I must stop such person, 
be he criminal, lunatic, or ignoramus, from wrecking 
innocent lives ; and if I can do it at no less cost 
than his life, it is my bounden duty to kill him. 
Tolerance about the colour of my neighbour's neck- 
tie or the shape of his hat is all very well, but 
tolerance of a belief which is going to plunge his 
soul into immortal torment is a burning sin. No- 
body who has once clearly glimpsed this truth will 
wonder afterwards that the most pitiless persecutors 
have often been among the finest specimens of 
human kind ; that Aurelius and Torquemada, who 
were men of every virtue, tortured and slaughtered 
for conscience' sake, while a pair of hoggish sensua- 
lists like Commodus and Heliogabalus did not 
trouble to persecute at all. Our second Charles 
and our second James were both poor creatures, 
but if we must needs choose between two such 
specimens of the infinitely little, James was the 
better of the two, and proved his superiority by 
the very persecutions which have made his name 
a byword. 

I have seen it stated that a Church of Science, 
were it once established and dominant, might 
persecute as bitterly as any of its predecessors. 
I cannot see why. Since Science leaves out of 
consideration altogether the postulate of Eternal 
Life, it can never hold that belief or disbelief 



132 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

in any of its dogmas can benefit or injure any- 
body to the extent sufficient to justify persecution. 
A man who denies the sphericity of the earth 
or the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of man 
injures nobody, not even himself. A man who 
sins against scientific fact, who holds, for instance, 
that cyanide of potassium is a good food, or that 
vitriol is a wholesome beverage, will not be likely 
to make converts, and a truly scientific society 
would be rather glad than otherwise when he 
tested his beliefs on his own person. A shortage 
of idiots would be the last of philosophic fears. 

Thinking as I do, I have sometimes been made 
rather angry by the conventional and almost 
universal belief that it is a sort of duty to be 
tender with other people's religious convictions, 
that it is bad form to tell religious believers that 
their beliefs are nonsensical. I was wrong in feel- 
ing angry, and I will presently say why I think 
I was wrong. But I do not find, either actually 
or historically, that the religious believer holds 
himself under any very binding obligation to be 
tender with people whose ways of thinking are 
different from his own. I have been told — politely 
by a broad-clothed curate in a drawing-room, and 
with furious impoliteness by a corduroy-clad orator 
in Hyde Park — that I devote myself to eternal 
torment by refusing to believe statements so natively 
incredible that I have passed a good part of my 
life in wondering how they ever came to be made 
I do not find that the earliest confessors of the 
Christian religion were conspicuously tender to 
the professors of the established creed which they 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 183 

sought to overthrow. It was a poor creed, no 
doubt, a thing of posturings and lustrations and 
charms and outward observances. But it must 
have had a core of reaHty for the nobler sort of 
man who practised it. There is to me a note of 
nobility and a note, too, of infinite pathos in 
Farrar's explanation of the day-and-night, moment- 
to-moment struggle to keep pure within the Law. 
"If but one person could only for one day keep 
the whole Law and not offend in one point the 
troubles of Israel would be ended, and the Messiah 
at last would come." We may easily believe that 
the hope, for ever deferred, of one day performing 
that impossibility and of ensuring that glorious 
redemption broke many a humble, pious human 
heart. People at once so righteous and so self- 
righteous as the Pharisees would have feelings as 
keen as most other people's, to say the least of it, 
and would relish ridicule and denunciation as little 
as any latter-day Christian. 

The real reasons why the scientific agnostic 
should be tender with the old type of believer are 
really perfectly simple. The statement that violent 
language is bad form is true, little as the average 
religious person acts upon it. And scientific truth, 
unlike religion — to judge by history — in this as in 
other respects, needs no violence to make its way. 
The deductions of science get accepted just as the 
multiplication table got accepted — because it is 
pure waste of time to question them. Truths, for 
the proclamation of which men have been burned, 
are to-day more potent influences on the life of the 
Pope himself than the dogmas of which he is the 



134 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

official guardian. Telephones were established in 
the Vatican some years ago, and work as well there 
as elsewhere. 

I remember once telling Robert Buchanan how 
completely the words he put into the mouth of his 
Philip Vanderdecken expressed my personal religious 
and philosophical evolution, and the goal at which 
I ultimately arrived, and at which I fancy I may 
venture to prophesy that I shall stay for the rest of 
my life. 

" All this season 

During my residence among you, 
I've sucked the poor, stale scraps of reason 

Your last philosophers have flung you. 
I've read through Comte, the Catechism, 
(Half common-sense, half crank and schism), 

And Harriet Martineau's synopsis ; 
Puzzled through Littrd's monstr' informous 
Encyclopsedia enormous, 

Until my brain grew blank as Topsy's. 
I've sucked the bloodless books of Mill, 

As void of gall as any pigeon ; 
I've swallowed Congreve's patent pill 

To purge man's liver of Religion ; 
I've tried my leisure to amuse 
With Freddy Harrison's reviews ; 
I've thumbed the essays of John Morley, 
So positive they made me poorly : — 
***** 
" The Zel>en /esu, Renan's Vie, 
I also studied thoroughly ; 
I vivisected cats with Lewes, 

I tortured gentle dogs with Ferrier, 
Found out just what grimalkin's mew is. 

And how tails wag in pug and terrier ; 
But came, however close I sought. 
No nearer to the riddle of Thought. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 135 



" Then finally, in sheer despair, 

Burn'd deep with Scepticism's caustic. 
Found Spencer staring at the air, 
Crying, ' God knows if God is there ! " 
And, in a trice, became agnostic ! " 

It is to Spencer that I owe the intellectual calm 
in which the last four-and-twenty years of my life 
have been passed, a calm which I believe to be 
henceforth unbreakable by any shadowy reincarna- 
tion of the old doubts. 

" The demonstration absolute 
Mortal nor angel can confute " 

of the division of the entire universe into two clean 
halves, the Knowable and the Unknowable, which 
occupies the opening pages of that truly colossal 
book, " First Principles," has not, I am aware, 
escaped philosophical onslaught, but I have never 
heard or read any attack upon it which was any- 
thing more or anything better than the merest 
chopping of metaphysical chaff. All the argument 
" about it and about " to which I had listened from 
'* doctor and sage " for so many wasted years were 
swept aside by the superb common-sense of that 
wonderful utterance. The study of the infinitely 
various phenomena by which we are surrounded is 
a necessity of our nature, and results in incalculable 
good to us and to our species. The belief that our 
little minds can ever grasp the attributes of the 
great underlying cause of those phenomena is a 
folly — I had well-nigh written, a blasphemy. The 
hope that, in long ages yet to come, our intelligence 
may expand to the capacity requisite for such a 



136 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

comprehension may be dwelt upon by those who 
care to toy with intellectual phantoms. To me, it 
has no interest. 

In some other matters I have parted company 
with Spencer. As a sociologist he is no longer 
what he once was to me, and I have turned from 
the empty husks and the chill water of his fierce 
individualism to the sustaining wine and fortifying 
bread of Socialism. I have my doubts whether, 
could Spencer have lived his long life over again, 
he would have drawn from it the sociological lessons 
his actual existence was spent in teaching. We 
know from his own pen by what a terrible tedium 
his final years were darkened, and I think it more 
than likely that that tedium was deepened, if not 
altogether caused, by his recognition that much of 
the doctrine with which his name will be most 
closely connected was based upon error. I owe 
that suspicion to certain words he let fall to me on 
the only occasion on which I enjoyed the honour of 
personal intercourse with him. Walking up and 
down the lawn of Buchanan's house in Maresfield 
Gardens, I told him, in a momentary absence of 
our host, what a load of personal obligation I felt 
under to " First Principles," and added that I in- 
tended to devote the reading hours of the next two 
or three years to a thorough study of his entire 
output. " What have you read of mine ? " he 
asked. I told him — the volume I have already 
mentioned, "The Study of Sociology," "The Man 
versus the State," " Social Statics," " The Data of 
Ethics," and the brochure, "Education." "Then," 
said Spencer — and it was the only time I have ever 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 137 

heard such a counsel from the lips of any writer 
regarding his own work — " I should say that you 
have read quite enough." He fell silent for a 
moment, and then added, " I have passed my life in 
beating the air. " It goes without saying that no 
truly great man has ever been satisfied with his 
own achievement. The contrast between the little 
he has actually accomplished and the much he had 
hoped, in the ardour of youth, to effect, must always 
exert a saddening influence, and the greater the 
man the greater that contrast will necessarily 
appear. But some incommunicable note in Spencer s 
voice told me that that reflection was not the 
only, perhaps not even the principal, cause of his 
melancholy. 

I look back on the time spent on the Riviera 
as by far the happiest of that period of my life. 
Christie was at the summit of his reputation, our 
joint circumstances were affluent, and the climate 
and scenery of the neighbourhood are both so 
beautiful that, granted merely physical health and 
the absence of any real trouble, existence can hardly 
be other than a joy. We rented the Villa Colbert, 
situated nearly on the crown of Montboron, just 
off the Old Villefranche Road. It was furnished 
with the barest necessaries, to which we made no 
addition, for all either of us needed was a table 
whereat to work and a bed wherein to sleep. To 
our right were the lower summits of the Alps ; at 
our feet the red-tiled roofs of Nice ; beyond, across 
the valley, the bald scalp of Cimiez ; to the left, the 
wide sweep of the bay and the blue waters of the 



138 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



Mediterranean ; and on exceptionally clear days 
could be seen, like a low-lying cloud, the rocky 
coast of Corsica. The garden of the villa was a 
wilderness of roses, which seem, in my recollection 
of the place, to have bloomed all the year round, 
although I do not make that as a statement of 
botanical fact. The precipice in which it termi- 
nated on one side divided it from the next of the 
innumerable terraces into which the declivity of the 
mountain is cut to prevent its thin clothing of soil 
being washed away by the autumn rains, and was 
masked by a line of alternate aloes and orange- 
trees, the last bearing fruit of a beautiful burnished 
golden-green, and of a quite unsurpassably acrid 
and bitter flavour — a bitter which bit to the bone 
of the palate. There were, too, several eucalyptus 
trees, whose pungent balsamic perfume seemed to 
concentrate at compound interest in the scorching 
heat, and to this day a chance whiff of that odour 
brings back the aspect of the place with startling 
clearness. 

Of a morning I wrote at Christie's dictation, 
the afternoon was occupied by my own work, and 
after our early dinner we either descended into the 
town for a game of billiards, or ran into Monte 
Carlo for a night's play at the tables. Monte Carlo 
is, I should fancy, one of the queerest and most 
individual places on earth, with an atmosphere all 
its own. The Metropolis of Play, the citadel and 
donjon-keep of the great Goddess of Chance, it is 
in itself a most eloquent, though most ineffectual 
and unregarded, sermon against the practices on 
which its prosperity is built. A barren, sterile 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 139 

promontory on which unaided Nature could not 
raise so much as a blade of grass, has been con- 
verted into a paradise of beauty and luxury at the 
cost of the countless fools who have flocked there 
for the past fifty years ; a human torrent which 
reaches flood-tide in the winter months, and never 
ceases to trickle briskly even in the hottest of the 
dog-days. There is no place in the whole world 
where money is so exclusively the subject of men's 
thoughts, and none in which it is less valued or 
more lightly flung away. It is difficult even to a 
cool temperament, and to an ardent one impossible, 
to remember the true value of gold and silver in 
those lofty, handsome apartments, musical with the 
crystalline clinking of piles of napoleons and five- 
franc pieces and the sibilant rustle of bank-paper, 
and echoing all day long to the ceaseless croak of 
the croupiers who dispense them with such a 
curious mingling of impassivity and keen-eyed alert- 
ness. A man who picked up a bag of gold or a 
thousand-franc note in the street would think him- 
self marvellously lucky, and would never dream of 
reproaching Fortune with niggardliness towards 
him ; but what is ten times that sum, picked up just 
as easily at Monte Carlo, compared with the serried 
piles of bullion protected by those weary, watchful 
eyes? 

Thackeray, generally a most close and accurate 
observer, speaks in " The Newcomes " of the now 
abolished gaming-saloons at Baden as of a theatre in 
which the student of his kind might study every 
phase of the quick-changing passions natural to 
the gambler — delirious delight and grim despair. 



140 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

exhibited in distorted features and frenzied impreca- 
tions. I can only suppose that our generation has 
learned to cloak its emotions with more decency, 
for in all the many hours I spent in the Salles de 
Jeu of the great " hell," euphemistically known as 
"le Cercle des Etrangers," I witnessed no such 
spectacle, and rarely heard a word which might not 
have been spoken in a Sunday school. Tragedies 
occur at Monte Carlo — they are vastly more 
numerous than its most constant habitues are 
aware of, for one of the heaviest of the many heavy 
expenditures made by the Administration figures 
on their books as " frais de Publicite," which is 
simply blackmail paid to the more important French 
journals for silence regarding scandals and suicides 
— but the public demeanour of the gamblers is 
decent even to the point of dulness as a general 
thing. Only at very long intervals do the passions 
which seethe below the surface overtly proclaim 
themselves without regard of time and place. I 
arrived one evening to find one of the tables 
covered by a black cloth, and on inquiry was 
told that only an hour previously a man — name, 
nationality, profession, and other details unknown 
— had scattered his brains over it and his fellow 
players with a pistol bullet. The other tables were 
as calmly busy as ever ; and, although I watched 
the local papers assidu6usly, I never saw a word 
about the affair, nor did I ever hear it referred to 
after the day on which it occurred. Monte Carlo 
is essentially a city of strangers — no single item in 
the crowd knows more than one or two scattered 
individuals among the throngs that fill it, and each 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 141 

is too intent on his own business or pleasure to take 
much heed of his neighbour. This easy callousness, 
common to all holiday resorts, blended with the 
unique moral atmosphere of Monte Carlo, takes 
strange and brutal forms sometimes. I had a slight 
acquaintance with a gentleman, a Russian noble- 
man, of whom another acquaintance told me a 
characteristic little story. He was strolling in the 
gardens one evening when, close at hand, he heard 
the crack of a pistol. His companion, and innumer- 
able other people, had rushed to the spot from which 

the sound proceeded. Not so Baron . As the 

report reached his ears he plucked his watch from 
his pocket and noted the exact moment — nine 
minutes to nine. He hurried to a table, and in 
half a dozen turns of the wheel had broken the 
bank by piling maximums on the number so 
indicated and on the transversale in which it stands. 
It is a true proverb — on ne prete qu'aux riches. 
Just as such human monsters of iniquity as Nero 
and Caesar Borgia and Alexander VI. were accused 
by their contemporaries of crimes of which they 
were no doubt perfectly capable, but which they did 
not happen to commit, and of which impartial history 
has absolved them, so Monte Carlo, that Sodom 
among modern cities, bears the blame of much done 
within her walls which is really no fault of hers. 
Suicides at Monte Carlo there are many, but not all 
who there untimely cut their mortal thread do so 
merely because the capricious deity who presides 
over the tables has been unkind to them. Men who 
are desperate before they set foot in the place; 
fraudulent trustees ; defaulting cashiers ; all sorts of 



142 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

rogues at odds with fortune, go there to play their 
last desperate stake, to make one despairing effort 
to retrieve their imperilled honour. No doubt, 
a certain percentage succeed, and Monte Carlo, 
which has ruined so many honester people, has 
very likely saved from the rope or the razor many 
a scoundrel by favouring his desperate ventures on 
the black or the red. For people do win there — 
indeed, were it not so, and did nobody ever come 
away a gainer, who would ever play there at all ? 
My own small adventures there shall presently be 
told, but they may well wait while the feats of a 
more august votary of Fortune are recounted. I 
was present one night when the Marquis de Talley- 
rand — a great-great-grandnephew of Napoleon's 
astute and shameless Minister — entered the rooms, 
and began a game so tremendous that scores of 
smaller punters left their play for the superior 
excitement of watching his. He played maximum 
every turn of the wheel on every possible hazard ; 
en plan, aux coins, a cheval, e7i transversale, column, 
dozen, and the simple chances — un vraijeu d'enfer, 
as I heard an awestruck voice whisper beside me. 
Charmed perhaps by such magnificent audacity, and 
conquered by the cool indifference with which he 
took her favours, Our Lady of Circumstance seemed 
to have given the fateful marble into the keeping of 
Monsieur le Marquis that night. He won every 
one of those awful coups, and broke the bank in less 
than ten minutes, and went away amid a roar of 
applause in which the very croupiers joined, with 
the same air of rather bored amiability he had worn 
throughout ; his pockets, and the corsage of the 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 143 

lady who accompanied him, bulging with bank- 
notes. I was greatly tickled by the conduct of one of 
the witnesses of that colossal gamble, an old, purblind 
Jew, with huge, flapping, elephantine ears jutting out 
under a skull-cap of black velvet, who had remained 
utterly unconscious of it. He sat just opposite to 
where the Marquis stood, betting five francs a time 
on the black. At every turn of the wheel a croupier 
raked in that meagre little stake, while his confrere 
handed to the Marquis a solid wad of bank-paper, 
but when the little old Hebrew's last coin — or the 
last he cared to risk — had gone, he turned to me 
and said, almost with tears in his voice, " Ack! mon 
Tieu, guelle jance hour la panque ! '* 

I think it is Balzac who somewhere says that 
while everybody is eager to extract profit from his 
better qualities, it occurs to nobody that, in given 
circumstances, his worst weakness might become 
his strongest asset. I have already frankly con- 
fessed my total imbecility in matters of finance and 
calculation. It has been a serious drawback in the 
general business of life, but it was the making of me 
in my dealings at Monte Carlo. Just as great 
mathematicians have spent years of wasted toil in 
trying to square the circle, you will meet people of 
very respectable calculative powers who believe it 
possible to invent a "system" to make winning at 
roulette a certainty. Among our acquaintances in 
Nice was a gentleman who had once been very 
wealthy, and who was stated to have lost seven 
millions of francs by the exploitation of a series of 
such systems of his own invention. Yet, when he 
turned up one day at the Villa Colbert with the 



144 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

statement that he had at last discovered " le vrai, 
le seul systeme philosophique," those incorrigible 
and hopeless optimists, Christie and Herman, sallied 
forth into Nice to buy a miniature roulette table 
and a couple of thousand beans for counters, and, 
under the instruction of M. de Paroli, devoted many 
hours to testing his new martingale. It worked 
beautifully — with the beans — and Herman had 
almost made up his mind as to which of the palatial 
villas on the Promenade des Anglais he would buy 
with the pillage of the bank when three nights rigid 
adherence to the system at Monte Carlo itself re- 
duced him and Christie to temporary penury. Being 
placidly convinced that the more perfect the system 
the less I should be able to understand or practise 
it, I resisted its contagion, and prospered. My 
plan, which I found to act excellently, was simplicity 
itself. I never risked more than a hundred francs 
on any single day. If I lost the whole of my day's 
capital, I accepted the loss and went away. If my 
luck was good, I backed it so long as it held, and 
stopped when it turned. By pursuing these tactics 
throughout the eighteen months during which Nice 
was my headquarters, I must have made a very fair 
amount of money. All through my stay on the 
Riviera I had a noble time, and denied myself 
nothing, and when the next of my periodic rows 
with Christie parted us again and I was thrown on 
my own resources I had a collection of books and 
a wardrobe which I found extremely useful in tiding 
me over the following spell of poverty. There are, 
as a matter of notorious fact, dozens of people every 
season at Monte Carlo to whom the tables are a 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 145 

source of steady revenue. They never risk more 
than a stated small sum — one or two louis — a day, 
and when fate is kind to them they may win ten or 
fifty or a hundred or a thousand times that amount. 

It was not long after the episode of my abortive 
marriage scheme that I found one of my few regular 
engagements in newspaper work on the staff of the 
London edition of the New York Herald. Mr. 
Gordon Bennett had been inspired to that adven- 
ture in journalism by the brilliant success of the 
Paris edition, but, if he had anticipated anything 
like a similar triumph, the result of the experiment 
must have been a grievous disappointment to him. 
One of the many reasons for its failure was the 
amazingly wrong-headed fashion in which it was 
managed. During the eleven months of my con- 
nection with it, the paper was edited by no fewer 
than fourteen different people. I have been told 
that the reason why I left it was that I was dis- 
charged in consequence of an irreverent comment 
on that circumstance. I went to sleep — so the 
story ran — on two chairs in the sub-editors' room, 
having previously given an office-boy a shilling on 
condition that he woke me at a certain hour and 
told me what quarter the wind was in and who was 
editing the Herald. That I may have done so is 
likely enough, though I have no memory of the 
circumstance, but it was certainly not the cause of 
my leaving the paper. I resigned voluntarily, in 
the following circumstances : — 

Sir — then Mr. — Henry Irving had revived at 
the Lyceum Theatre, " in commemoration of the 

L 



14G A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



centenary of the French Revolution," Watts Phillips' 
melodrama The Dead Heart. I went to see it. 
I thought — and think — that it was one of the silliest 
and most futile lumps of rubbish it has ever been 
my bad luck to see. Henry Irving was among the 
half-dozen greatest European actors of the latter 
half of the nineteenth century, but it is a regrettable 
fact that he was also one of the worst judges of 
drama that ever held in his hands the destinies of 
an important theatre. So long as he stuck to 
Shakespeare and Goethe he was all right, for the 
simple and sufficing reason that he could not go 
wroncr, but when he went on his own judgment he 
infallibly made a mess of it. Another of his revivals 
was George Colman's Iron Chest, an appallingly 
bad adaptation of a dull and stupid novel written, 
in some queer mental aberration, by Godwin, the 
profound political thinker to whom the world owes 
" Political Justice." Among Irving s original pro- 
ductions was The Mad Doctor, one of the 
woodenest and least convincing melodramas that 
ever got itself produced, which Irving proclaimed 
— before its production — to be as fine a piece of 
work as Erckmann-Chatrian's Bells. The appal- 
ling badness of The Dead Heart seemed some- 
how to have communicated its contagion to the 
generally admirable actors who appeared in it. 
They included Irving himself, Sir Squire Bancroft, 
Edward Righton, Miss Ellen Terry, and Miss Kate 
Phillips, and I never saw any one of those excellent 
comedians to less advantage. As I was eating my 
supper after the performance in the Marble Hall — 
whose place now knows it no more—the ablest of 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 147 

the many editors of the Herald, and one of the 
most kindly and friendly men I have ever met, 
John Reid, came and sat beside me. I gave him 
my impressions of my evening's experience, with 
which — he had seen the show on the previous 
night — he heartily concurred. " The worst of it 

is," he continued, " " (naming the dramatic critic 

of the Herald) "praised the blamed thing. How 
can we take it back without looking foolish ? " 
" Let me write an open letter to Irving," I suggested. 
" You shall," said Reid ; " and I'll put it into next 
Sunday's issue." So said, so done. I wrote the 
letter before I went to bed that night, and handed 
it in to Reid next day. 

At that date, and for some time thereafter, the 
late Joseph Hatton occupied some undefined position 
on the Herald. What functions he fulfilled I never 
knew, but he had some sort of power, and Reid — 
an autocrat, as every good editor is, and needs 
must be — rather resented this. Hatton, as all the 
world knows, was an intimate personal friend of 
Irving. He had edited the great actor's " Impres- 
sions of America," and was one of his most sturdy 
admirers and partisans. At the moment of com- 
missioning me to write my Open Letter, Reid had 
remarked, " Hatton will rile up at this, sure, but it's 
going in, and if he doesn't like it he'll just have to 
lump it." On the day preceding the appearance of 
the letter a curious thing happened. Reid, returning 
from lunch, met Hatton coming out of his — Reid's — 
room. Reid had left a proof of my letter to Irving 
on the spike-file standing on his desk. On looking 
for it, he found it gone. Returning from dinner he 



148 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

found it on the spike again. Reid's conclusion 
was that Hatton having read the letter — which he 
had a perfect right to do — had gone across to the 
Lyceum, scarce a hundred yards away from the 
Herald office on the other side of the Strand, and 
had shown it to Irving, disclaiming all responsibility 
for its authorship, inspiration, or appearance. Who 
its author was, he could not know, although he 
might possibly guess, for it was signed by the 
pseudonym " The Candid Friend," and nobody but 
Reid, myself, and the compositor who had stuck 
the type, was aware even of its existence. 

The letter appeared, and made its little fleeting 
half-hour of talk and conjecture, as such things will. 
Reid professed himself delighted with it, and sug- 
gested that I " might make myself a nuisance to a 
whole heap of respectable Christian citizens " by 
writing a similar letter every week to some selected 
celebrity over the same signature. I consented, 
and for some nine or ten weeks " The Candid 
Friend" exhibited perhaps more candour than 
friendship regarding the personalities and perform- 
ances of as many prominent figures in the theatrical 
and literary worlds. The identity at first concealed 
behind the signature leaked out, as was inevitable, 
and I received a certain number of letters, abusive 
or laudatory, from various people, according as 
they sympathised or otherwise with my judgments. 
Reid had raised my salary, and for the only time 
in my life I found myself in receipt of a steady ten 
pounds a week. Once again the world looked 
bright before me, in spite of the continued rejections 
of " A Song of Sixpence." 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 149 

My Nemesis was but sleeping, however, and 
that with one eye open. Reid had held the editorial 
chair for some fifteen or sixteen weeks — a lonsfer 
time than any of his successors — but he was elderly, 
a free-liver, and a martyr to some painful chest- 
complaint with which the atmosphere of London 
held no truce. He was suddenly and peremptorily 
ordered to Algiers. A week after his departure, 
which was loudly lamented by everybody on the 
staff, I was again supping in the Marble Hall when 
my colleague, Harry Dam, entered with a strange 

gentleman, whom he presented as Mr. , the 

new editor of the Herald, just arrived from New 

York. In the course of conversation Mr. 

asked me, " Say, Mr. Murray, do you happen to 
know Bram Stoker's address ? " I replied that I 
did not, but that he could easily get it by applying 

at the Lyceum Theatre. Mr. volunteered the 

statement that he was one of Mr. Stoker's closest 
friends " on the other side." I cannot say precisely 
that such an *' ice-talon'd prong as shot through the 
brain and pericardium of Balaam " when he heard 
his ass speak assailed me at that moment, but I did 
murmur to myself the sporting query, ** With Joseph 
Hatton still in his place of undefined power in the 
Herald office and a gentleman who is a close friend 
of Mr. Bram Stoker installed as editor — what price 
* The Candid Friend ' } " The blow fell promptly, 

as I had anticipated. The next day Mr. , in 

the friendliest fashion in the world, gave me editori- 
ally to understand that my letters must cease. I 
replied that if they stopped I left the paper. " I 
shall be sorry to lose your services," replied the 



150 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

editor, "but the letters must stop. London's had 
enough of them, and we mustn't bore the public." 
I pointed out that that was hardly Hkely to happen, 
because the pubHc wasn't reading the Herald. 

Mr. , with the delightful American bonhomie 

which welcomes many jests at which the average 
Englishman would probably be angry, accorded 
a smile to my epigram, but was adamantine on 
the main point. The continuance of " The Candid 
Friend " was vetoed, so I left the paper. 

I acted foolishly in doing so, from every point 
of view. It was foolish, in the first place, to throw 
away a regular and sufficient salary merely for a 
momentary pique, a thing no man is justified in 
doing unless he is sure of another berth as good, 
which was certainly not the case with me. The 
Letters had given me a certain reputation, but it 
was a reputation of the wrong sort, as a fault-finder 
and a firebrand, and I did not find that there was 
any marked rush on the part of editors to engage 
me. I have always hated journalism, and in that 
also I have been unwise, because — let any literary 
aspirant into whose hands these pages may fall take 
note of this — there is no such school in the world 
for a youngster who desires to make the writing of 
fiction his profession as is offered by the daily work 
of journalism. It brings him into intimate touch 
with all kinds of people and sends him into all kinds 
of places which, in any other line of life, he would 
probably never see. There is no social extreme 
between — and including — an Archbishop and a hang- 
man with which he may not find himself in contact 
at some moment or other. In a newspaper office 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 151 

a young man sucks in knowledge of the world as 
Joey Ladle took in his alcoholic stimulant, by the 
pores. And although, during his novitiate, journalism 
may give him few or no opportunities of airing his 
powers as a writer, the merely literary training it 
affords is excellent of its sort. It teaches him to 
think clearly, and to express his meaning perspicu- 
ously. And it is the one profession I know of — 
except the stage — which pays the neophyte while 
teaching him his business. The articled lawyer's 
clerk, the aspirant to the Bench or the Church, the 
medical student, the art student, all have to undergo 
a more or less costly apprenticeship. The young 
journalist, even if he starts on the lowest rung on 
the staff of a small provincial paper, is paid at least 
something from the start. There is, too, this other 
advantage, that a young man of talent, either literary 
or merely journalistic — the two talents are getting 
more and more widely differentiated with every 
passing year — is certain of success if he will only 
stick to his work. Journalism presents the curious 
anomaly of an absolutely open profession, open to 
all who care to enter it, which yet never seems 
overcrowded, and in which talent, if its possessor 
will simply exercise a little common-sense humility, 
and be content awhile to do the daily work for the 
daily wage, is certain to win its way. My personal 
failure as a journalist has never made me blind to 
the truth of what I am now writing. It was wholly 
and entirely my own fault. I contemned the work 
it offered me, thinking it trivial — which is a half- 
truth, and unimportant — which is an entire false- 
hood. It is, as I have said elsewhere, a serious 



152 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

mistake to think so, as if a man should admire the 
completed palace and yet despise the individual 
bricks of which it is built. 

I have many pleasant reminiscences of my time 
on the Herald. I have never met a merrier, brighter, 
cleverer, and all-round more friendly and pleasant 
crowd than " the boys " who contributed to its 
columns. John Reid in especial was a perfectly 
angelic editor. He was iron hard on negligence or 
incompetence, and would hold no truce with them. 
Like most Americans of talent he was saturnine and 
sententious, and if he did not like a man he could 
make himself supremely and memorably nasty. I 
remember him sitting in his armchair, with the 
perennial stump of a big cigar, which never seemed 
to vary in length, in a corner of his mouth, with one 
eye shut and the other expressing an absolute and 
most galling contempt for his interlocutor, and 
saying, at the conclusion of a flowing period which 
the latter had obviously fancied to be most impres- 
sive and convincing, " Sir, you make me tired. You 
have more words and fewer ideas than any other 
person I have yet struck in my airthly pilgrimage." 
I remember also a phrase he applied to a certain 
member of the Herald staff who came over from 
the States with a huge reputation as a journalistic 
" hustler." " To go to that man for notions," said 
Reid, "is like dredging hell for oysters." But I 
have never been better pleased in my life than with 
the quiet, stolid nod with which he rewarded such 
work of mine as he really liked, and the low-voiced 
comment, " That's right, sonnie." 

Every member of the staff of the Herald — which, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 153 

be it remembered, was a seven-day paper — had one 
day's holiday per week. My day of recreation 
coincided with that of Ervin B. Hawkins, a bright 
young gentleman who hailed from an extensive 
region which he was in the habit of describing as 
the "Wild and Woolly West." He had a con- 
suming thirst for the stock attractions of London, 
and as his cicerone I saw more of the metropolis 
than I have ever seen before or since. We went 
on one occasion to the Tower. After seeing the 
regulation sights, with which — especially the axe 
and block and the Crown jewels — he was much 
delighted, he suggested that there must be many 
other spectacles in a building so old and so in- 
timately associated with the most romantic episodes 
of English history, to which everybody might not 
be admitted. We were lucky enough to get hold 
of an intelligent Beefeater, who knew vastly more 
of the history of the Tower than one gathers from 
the stereotyped gabble of the ordinary guide. 
Among other places to which he conducted us 
was the vaulted semi-cellar in which prisoners, 
political, ecclesiastical, and others, were tortured. 
It is used now — or was then — as a record room. 
The Beefeater pointed out to us the low beds of 
solid masonry on which, in unimaginable torments, 
many a score of nameless wretches had sobbed 
and shrieked their lives away. He showed us 
the four holes in the stone pavement in which the 
rack had been clamped down, and in the farthest 
recess of that horrible Gehenna, a dim circle of 
concrete, rather lighter in tone than the time- 
stained masonry which surrounded it. That circle, 



154 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

the Beefeater told us, marked the site of an old 
dry well in which some years earlier the hideously 
broken and mutilated skeletons of some scores of 
human beings had been found. I do not think 
that the pure air and broad sunlight could have 
been much sweeter to any creature who had passed 
through the terrors of that dreadful place than they 
seemed to me as I emerged from it. I was on the 
verge of actual physical sickness. Hawkins and I 
strolled along in pensive silence for awhile, when 
he remarked, in a musing, rather envious kind of 
tone, "We've got nothing like that in the States." 
I tried to cheer him by pointing out that America 
had possessed the institution of chattel slavery, that 
it had produced the Trusts, the cities of Pittsburg 
and Chicago, and Mr. Jay Gould, but he refused to 
be comforted. " It was horrible. It makes a man's 
blood turn the wrong way. But it gives the country 
an atmosphere." I have often been a witness of 
the indescribable sensations with which a man of 
English blood and alien birth beholds the relics 
of our island history. I remember on one occasion 
crossing the North Sea from Ostend in company 
with a typical Yankee, hard-headed, cool, unimagi- 
native, sardonic. I can remember the sudden 
pressure of his hand upon my shoulder, and the 
choking croak with which he extended his arm 
towards the horizon and said, " My God ! Is that 
England?'^ And when I answered "Yes," he 
settled his elbows upon the rail and stared at the 
broadening strip of land as hungrily as Christian 
devoured the distant hills of Beulah, with the silent 
tears running down his face. I can remember 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 155 



taking a little Australian lady for her first visit to 
Westminster Abbey, and the wild wonder with 
which, following the direction of my finger, she 
read upon the slab beneath her feet, " Sacred to 
the Memory of Charles Dickens," and recognised 
that she was standing over the dust of the splendid 
and delightful genius who had given us " David 
Copperfield." But my friend Hawkins's patriotic 
envy of the Tower torture-chamber did, as he might 
himself have expressed it, " yank the bun " over 
any other similar expression of enthusiasm. 

Reid, knowing that I had more or less acquaint- 
ance with a fair number of British celebrities, 
developed a habit of sending me out to collect 
opinions regarding any interesting ** mystery " of 
the day. That lurid and ever-vanishing nightmare 
of criminality, " Jack the Ripper," was then per- 
vading the Whitechapel district, and I inspected 
his last victim, lying on the slab of the mortuary. 
Reid suggested that I should go forth and interview 
any celebrities I could find regarding the identity 
of the criminal. I called on Walter Besant, Robert 
Buchanan, James Payn, and Henry Labouchere. 
1 was — or flattered myself that I was — a bit of a 
favourite with Mr. Labouchere, whom I had inter- 
viewed on similarly curious themes on several other 
occasions. He received me with the query, " Well, 
young man, what's the imbecility this time }" " I 
have come," I said, " to ask you if you have any 
theory regarding the identity of 'Jack the Ripper'?" 
" Well," he said, rolling the eternal cigarette in his 
mouth — I never saw him without the cigarette, 
except on one occasion, when I caught a glimpse 



156 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

of him in his place in the House of Commons — " I 
don't know that I've formed any theory. But 
I suppose you'd like one ? " I replied that I should 
be greatly obliged if he could evolve one for the 
occasion. " Then," said he, " I'll tell you what. 
Say it's me. Lots of people will believe it, and I 
promise you I won't contradict it." The New York 
Herald issued a special placard next day, bearing 
the inscription, " Identity of Jack the Ripper — 
Astounding Confession ! " And for once, at least, 
the public read the Herald. 

One memorable consequence of my connection 
with the Herald was a meeting with George Mere- 
dith, with whom I passed a day at his house at Box 
Hill in the following circumstances. It had struck 
me that " The Candid Friend " letters, supplemented 
with other critical matter, might make a saleable 
volume, and I had forwarded the script to Messrs. 
Chapman & Hall, for whom, at that time, Mr. 
Meredith acted as reader. I received from him a 
letter, the gist of which was that he thought the 
project inadvisable, although he was kind enough 
to describe my utterances as those of " a stout, 
natural voice, contrasting notably with the cluck 
and gabble of the Newspaper Press." Such an 
intimation I regarded as final, and wrote him a 
brief note to that effect, replied to in turn by an 
invitation to spend a day with him. I selected a 
beautiful Sunday morning in early spring. The 
maid who admitted me to the o^arden at Box Hill 
told me that Mr. Meredith was at work in the 
chalet, but I was kindly received by his eldest son, 
who shortly after died, and by Miss Meredith, who 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 157 

were sunning themselves on the front steps of the 
house. We were talking together when I heard a 
slow step crunching the gravel behind me, and the 
young lady said, " Here is my father." I rose, and 
confronted a tall old man, whose extreme leanness 
made him appear of more than his actual height. 
He was loosely clad in grey tweeds and a soft felt 
hat, and carried a crooked oaken walking-stick. I 
had seen a profile portrait of him, published as a 
frontispiece to one of his books, but certainly should 
never unaided have recognised him as its original. 
It had represented a face of more than feminine 
delicacy, with an almost angelic softness of expres- 
sion. That is not at all a description of Mr. 
Meredith as he appeared in the year 1889. His 
features, independently of his grey beard and 
moustache, were strongly masculine, and expressed 
physical and intellectual virility of the highest and 
keenest sort. It was the face of an intellectual 
gladiator rather than that of a poet, and had 
nothing in it of the ascetic or the saint. He 
welcomed me with a simple and most encouraging 
cordiality — I had been rather afraid of meeting 
him, for I considered, and still consider, him very 
much the greatest man I have ever had the 
privilege of encountering in intimate converse. He 
had a curious and memorable voice, a voice which 
gripped the ear somewhat as chianti grips the palate. 
His manner might be described by that conveniently 
nebulous phrase, " old-fashioned," with a breadth, 
repose, rotundity, and stateliness seldom met with 
nowadays. He spoke with a marked drawl, and 
with the accent common to English gentlemen of 



158 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



the period of the Piccadilly-weeper whisker and the 
peg-top pantaloon — the accent of Sothern's Lord 
Dundreary. Having shaken hands with me, he 
dropped into a canvas camp-stool, his legs stretched 
out in front of him and resting on the heels; his 
hands clasped on the crook of his walking-stick ; 
and I beheld the indubitable physical original of 
Dr. Shrapnel. Like the immortal Doctor, he had 
a huge tuft of obstinate grey hair bristling up over 
his forehead, and he had the habit of constantly 
endeavouring to smooth it back into its place 
among the mass which he attributes to Nevil 
Beauchamp's political Mentor. I was soon aware 
that these were not the only particulars in which 
he resembled Dr. Shrapnel. He had a way of 
divagating suddenly from dialogue into monologue, 
and of adding cryptic asides, often accompanied by 
brief, grim chuckles, to an interlocutor invisible to 
his companions. He would have been a trying 
associate to an intellectually lazy man, for he talked 
precisely as he writes, and kept his hearer's wits, as 
he keeps his reader's, perpetually astrain to follow 
the thread of his ideas. At that date he was but 
comincr into the kingdom he had fairly won years 
earlier ; the critics who had so long neglected him 
had still a habit of accusing him of intentional 
obscurity and excentricit^ voulue, but that day's talk 
with him quite dispelled any such illusion from my 
mind. An involved reticulation of thought and 
quaintness of expression are in him no affectations, 
but as purely natural as the sledge-hammer forth- 
rightness of Macaulay or the perfect plainness of 
Defoe. Year after year of public neglect and critical 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 159 

inappreciation have had, no doubt, some influence 
in indurating those peculiarities, as they probably- 
had had in the cases of his similarly treated con- 
temporaries, Carlyle and Browning. Artists who 
find the best they can give contemned or disre- 
garded by the great mass, are apt to work only for 
the chosen few whom they attracted from the first, 
and disdainfully to accentuate the oddities which 
repel the crowd. 

We took a long walk together through the 
lanes of the vicinity and over the estate of a neigh- 
bouring baronet, to which my host had been granted 
access, and talked of a multitude of things. He 
spoke of having been recently engaged on trans- 
lating certain passages of Homer into English 
verse, though which passages I have forgotten. 
Apropos of some subject spoken of between us he 
told me of the existence in manuscript of a novel 
entitled ** The Journalist," which, for reasons he did 
not confide to me, would not be published until 
after his decease. He spoke in high terms of the 
French literature of the day, with its fearless spirit 
of inquiry and discussion, and its tonic, healthy 
outspokenness, as contrasted with the prevailing 
English pusillanimity. In wit, the French were 
incomparable, and he claimed for them also a high 
place as humorists. As a general literary vehicle 
he preferred English to any other language. The 
talk fell on Tennyson, and I found, to my surprise, 
that he had never come across the then Laureate's 
ringing lines, "The third of February, 1853." I 
quoted a line or two, and he asked, " Do you know 
the rest ? " On my replying " Yes," he said " Give 



160 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

me that, sir, give me that," and I recited the entire 
poem, he standing with his feet wide apart, his 
hands on the crook of his stick, his eyes regarding 
the sky under contracted, beetling brows, and his 
mouth slightly ajar. I felt rather nervous and 
slightly ridiculous standing spouting there, but he 
seemed quite unconscious of anything humorous 
in the situation. '* That is great, great ! " he said 
emphatically, when I had finished. He expressed 
a high opinion of Tennyson as a verbal artist, and 
cited several passages, among them that from " The 
Daisy," descriptive of the distant Alps as viewed 
from the summit of Milan Cathedral : — 

" How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair, 
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there — 

A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys 
And snowy dells in a golden air." 

I said that it was very beautiful. '' It is too beauti- 
ful," he replied, though what he meant by that he 
did not explain. 

We returned to the house, to find other guests 
awaiting him. Among them was the late Leslie 
Stephen, who, I have heard it said, was the original 
of Vernon Whitford, of " The Egoist." It might 
well have been so, for " Phoebus Apollo turned 
fasting-friar " is a phrase of photographic accuracy, 
a living word-picture of Stephen as I saw him that 
day. He stayed only for a brief while, to my 
regret, for he was a man for whose scholarship, 
intellect, and fearless honesty I had a strong 
admiration, and I would fain have seen more of 
him. Years after, a few months before his death, I 
had a brief correspondence with him, but that day 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 161 

at Box Hill was the only time we met. There 
were several young people also, who appeared to be 
familiars of the house. The host seemed to be as 
young at heart as any one among them, and was 
obviously a huge favourite. Somebody mentioned 
the Elephant and Castle, and a young lady new to 
London asked what that might be. Mr. Meredith 
immediately dashed into the recital of a legend, 
obviously the creation of the moment, concerning 
an elephant, a castle, and an oriental prince, of 
which I have quite forgotten the details, but which 
struck me at the moment as a quite wonderful bit of 
improvisation. At dinner also his powers in that 
direction came out. One of the guests would drink 
nothing but mineral water, and Mr. Meredith 
warned him against that habit with an intense, and 
even tragic, solemnity, illustrating its dangers by an 
horrific story about a fellow-collegian at Dusseldorf 
— " when I was studying medicine there " — who 
had fallen a victim to an unbridled thirst for that 
class of beverage. The unfortunate youth had died 
suddenly and in inexpressible agony, leaving behind 
him a solemn request that the autopsy should be 
performed by his friend, George Meredith. "When 
I made the first incision," said the narrator, suiting 
the action to the word with a horrible pantomimic 
gusto on the joint of mutton he was carving, " the 
glitter of the stalactites in the poor fellow's gastric 
cavity positively blinded me — I had to wear blue 
glasses for months after." 

Among the other celebrities with whom I fore- 
gathered as an envoy of the Herald was the once 

M 



162 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

notorious and now well-nigh forgotten political 
adventurer, General Boulanger, with whom I had 
a brief interview at the house in Portland Place 
which he tenanted during his English exile. Ten 
minutes is but a short space in which to read any 
man's character, but what I saw of le brav' General 
did not very greatly impress me. Unless I am 
vastly mistaken in my estimate of him he was a 
mass of vanity, and vanity of a curiously puerile 
sort ; and I left him wondering how such a person 
could ever, even for a moment, have imperilled the 
peace of a great country, and possibly of all Europe. 
He was a decidedly handsome man, with an air, 
when in repose, of strength and dignity which quite 
evaporated in the least excitement, and his laugh 
was indescribably fatuous. I cannot believe that he 
was ever anything more than the stalking-horse of 
the little clique of "spoof" politicians of whom 
Henri Rochefort was at once the leader and the 
type ; fishermen in troubled waters, with no real 
programme except to keep things generally lively, 
and no real convictions save of their own amazing 
cleverness and the infinite gullibility of the rest of 
mankind. His suicide in Brussels was the final 
clou of a rather silly melodrama, and by the time 
that the famous " March " had been superseded on 
the street-organs by some other blatant bit of 
musical vulgarity he was practically forgotten. 

But perhaps the most memorable of the many 
personalities whose fleeting acquaintance I made at 
this epoch was that of a certain magnate of the 
University of Oxford. He was the only specimen 
of his species I have ever encountered or even to 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 163 

my knowledge beheld, and he ranks in my memory 
as the most astounding human product in my ex- 
perience. He was a don of one of the oldest and 
wealthiest colleges, a man somewhere well on the 
sunny side of sixty. He had obviously been an 
athlete in his youth, and he was as hard and clean 
from head to foot as a new steel nail. He had a 
grand head, clear-cut as a cameo, and an eye like a 
stag's. He wore the clerical uniform, which fitted 
him as though he had been melted and poured into 
it, and his choker and cuffs glowed with a silver 
purity. He is probably a bishop by now, and if he 
would vert, I feel certain that the Sacred College 
would make him immortal as the second English 
Pope. I spoke with this splendid phenomenon for 
full five minutes, and the interview was, as Zola 
says of the moment when Renee Saccard made her 
obeisance before the Emperor, la note aigue dans la 
tnilodie monotone de ma vie. I shall remember that 
interview while I remember anything. I suppose 
he was a scholar — very certainly he was a gentle- 
man, for only a gentleman could have been so 
extremely offensive with so little offence. I don't 
suppose he would have questioned that I was a 
vertebrate animal : he might even have admitted 
that I was a man, and, if not quite a brother, yet in 
some distant degree a sort of poor relation. Can 
you fancy the proudest planter of Old Virginia 
holding condescending communication with a manu- 
mitted nigger ? Can you imagine the Imperial 
Majesty of Germany giving affable audience to the 
smallest drummer-boy in the Imperial Army ? It 
was like that. Every hair of his head, every 



164 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

wrinkle of his clothing, every tone of his voice, said 
audibly, " You are no doubt a very good sort of 
person in your way and place, but you are not 
Oxford, and I have no sort of use for you." So 
long as memory holds her seat I shall remember 
that splendid, that serene, that sumptuous Snob. 

That don has come to typify Oxford in my 
mind. He was physically beautiful, as Oxford is. 
He was venerable, learned, splendid, as Oxford is. 
He stood upon the accumulated legacy of centuries 
of venerability, of learning, of splendour, as Oxford 
does. But also, like Oxford, and like everything 
else in this mixed world of ours, he had the defects 
of his qualities. His venerability was the accident 
of age, his learning was obsolete, his splendour 
was based on a quite exaggerated and erroneous 
estimate of his personal importance — all of which 
is true of Oxford. He was a great man and a law- 
giver among schoolboys, but I could but wonder 
how he would have shown in adult society not of 
his own set. I found him wandering in my fancy 
through a hundred scenes with which he was 
ludicrously incongruous. How would he shape, I 
wondered, in a newspaper office at 12 p.m. with 
" a column and a turn " to knock out in three- 
quarters of an hour on some unexpected develop- 
ment of the fiscal problem, or the outbreak of an 
epidemic of smallpox in Bethnal Green ? What 
would be the value of his opinion on the chances of 
this year's Derby ; how would he show in Tatter- 
sail's ring ? What would he have had to say for 
himself in the smoking-room of the House of 
Commons, or of an ordinary middle-class club, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 165 

where doctors, lawyers, merchants, stock-brokers, 
and scientists were discussing the questions of the 
day ? Could he lay a row of bricks, plough a 
furrow, handle a spade, work a lathe, or perform a 
surgical operation ? Could he do anything, or 
teach anybody else to do anything, except to quote 
Greek, turn out mathematical formulae, or to be an 
upright, honourable, wrong-headed, and generally 
ornamental and useless encumbrance ? 

As I have confessed, my failure in journalism 
was principally, if not entirely, my own fault. All 
the same, my journalistic luck has been by no 
means of the best. I have already given one 
sample. Here is another, dating some seven-and- 
twenty years back. I was chronically hard up in 
those days, and at this particular period I had 
struck the very bed-rock of poverty. I was sleep- 
ing on the Thames Embankment, and living on 
God knows what — I don't remember, at this time 
of day, how I held body and soul together. But 
I remember one particular meal, and how it was 
obtained. There was a certain baker's shop in 
Tottenham Court Road, with a window of which 
the lower sash was capable of being raised to 
permit the obtrusion a little way into the street of 
a sort of broad wooden tray, supported at its outer 
extremity by iron uprights resting on the pavement. 
On this, bread and cakes were exposed for sale. 
One morning — I had eaten nothing for four days, 
and had had nothing between my teeth during 
the whole of that time but water from a street 
fountain — I stood still to sniff up the scent of the 



166 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

new-baked loaves, hot from the oven. There was 
nobody in the shop but the baker, whose back was 
turned. A rapid glance right and left assured me 
that nobody was near at hand. I walked quickly 
past the shop, and with the dexterity of a practised 
conjuror transferred a small loaf of brown bread to 
my jacket pocket. In another half minute I had 
doubled the corner of Rowland Street and was 
tearing at my prize with the horrible avidity of a 
famished dog, with tears of rage and shame and 
pure animal ecstasy pouring down my cheeks. 
" Ah, Dieu, quil est bon et triste de manger quand 
on creve ! " 

On the afternoon of that same day, wandering 
along the Strand, I met an acquaintance, one 
"Jimmy" Adair, a brother journalist, of consider- 
ably greater age and experience than my own, who 
had also had his troubles. Jimmy had been editor 
of a paper in Demerara for some years, and being a 
thrifty soul, had managed to amass a goodly sum 
of money, some six or seven hundred pounds. 
Leaving the place for England, he had invested 
his savings in rum, and had embarked Caesar and 
his fortunes — himself and his rum — on the same 
ship. In mid-ocean the ship caught fire, and 
Jimmy, from the retreat of an open boat, had seen 
her burn to the water's edge, a grand pyrotechnic 
exhibition, to the glories of which his rum — poor 
boy ! — had nobly contributed. It had been a sore 
experience, but he took it with a certain stolid gaiety, 
and faced the world anew, penniless, but cheerful. 
It is many a long year since I have seen him, but, if 
he be still " on live," I hereby send my love to him. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 167 

Jimmy had news for me. Had I heard of the 
new weekly paper, the People, which was to start 
next Saturday ? I had not. Well, the People 
was a fact, or on the point of becoming so, and, 
moreover, Jimmy was appointed sub-editor. The 
editor was Sebastian Evans. He and I were both 
Birmingham men, he knew my brother, Jimmy 
would introduce me to him, why not try my luck 
with him? I was only too glad to try my luck, and 
Jimmy and I went together to the office — the 
identical office which, when the People moved later 
to another address, served as headquarters to the 
London edition of the New York Herald. Sebastian 
Evans received me kindly, and promised immediate 
perusal of any contribution I might offer. I went 
to Adair's room and there wrote at hot speed an 
article entitled " The Hotel of the Beautiful Star," 
descriptive of my last week s nocturnal experiences 
on the Embankment. Taking my courage in both 
hands, I knocked at the door of Evans's room. 
He was obviously surprised to see me again so 
soon, but on my presenting my manuscript, said 
simply, "Sit down, please." He read the article, 
tossed it into a pigeon-hole, and scribbled a line on 
a sheet of paper. "If the cashier shouldn't be 
there, I'll cash it myself," he said. The cashier 
was there, as it happened, and handed me two 
sovereigns and two shillings. Jimmy and I went 
over to the Gaiety bar together — the old Gaiety 
bar, another lost landmark — and I ate my first real 
meal for a good fortnight. And that evening I 
made a special pilgrimage to Tottenham Court Road, 
and dropped a sixpence on to the baker's tray. 



168 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

For some little time thereafter — as long as he 
held the editorship — Evans accepted an article 
every week from me, and I was in clover. Then 
he left the paper, and a new man came, bringing 
his tail with him, as new editors have a knack of 
doing. A king arose who knew not Joseph, and 
once again hard times resumed their broken 
sway. 

Sebastian Evans was a very remarkable man, 
and would have been universally so regarded, had 
he chosen to exercise any one of his innumerable 
talents to the neglect of the rest. He was a doctor 
both of medicine and law ; he was a brilliant 
journalist, a first-class linguist, and a most able 
barrister. His reason for taking to the bar was 
characteristic. He had somehow become inspired 
with a deadly hatred of a certain well-known 
pleader, and determined, in his own phrase, to 
*' have a smack at him." To that end, he qualified 
as a barrister, and let it be known that, whatever 
might be the merits of the cause, and for any fee or 
none at all, he would be ready to fight any case in 
which the object of his detestation held the opposing 
brief. For a session or two he neglected all his 
other multifarious pursuits for the one dear delight 
of badgering his enemy, and, I am sure, got plenty 
of amusement out of his freak. He painted suffi- 
ciently well to be exhibited by the R.A., and he 
wrote one or two volumes of really fine verse — 
" Brother Fabian's Manuscript," and "In the 
Studio." He gave me a copy of the latter volume, 
which I have most unfortunately lost, but I remem- 
ber a few lines which seem to me to show merit 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 169 



high above that of most minor poetry. There was 
a poem called " The King to Be," which opened — 

" Weary with watching and worn with fight 
The King to Be sat alone with the night, 
For foes were many and friends were few, 
And the friends were false, but the foes were true." 

There was a phrase descriptive of the walls of the 
Heavenly City as beheld afar off in a vision, *' like 
wine smitten to stone," which struck me as very 
fine. And there was a lilting bit of verse satirising 
the slapdash school of impressionist painting, of 
which I can remember only the following eight 
lines : — 

" True, the rudest of strokes shews you clearly 
The painter who can from who can't, 
But to-day 'tis the artist not merely 
Who can, but who does, that we want. 

" Not the trick of the trowel and plaster. 
To shew that your handling is free. 
But the trick of the genuine master — 
The trick that no mortal can see." 

Evans was, besides, a monument of learning, the 
sort of man to whom one appealed as to an encyclo- 
paedia, with a placid certainty of getting the infor- 
mation one needed. I asked him once why he had 
never taken a line and stuck to it. " Because I'm 
a damned old fool, my boy," he answered. " But," 
he added, "I'm the happiest old fool in Europe, and 
my one regret is that I can't have my time over 
again." The last I heard of him was that, at an 
age when most men would have been nailed to 
an armchair in the chimney-corner, he had taken 



170 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

to agriculture, and was learning to plough on his 
own farm. 

I have had a rather extensive acquaintance with 
that curious development of modernity, the Amateur 
Journalist. The amateur is a fearsome person, 
whatever be the particular art or science in which 
he may elect to exhibit his incompetence, but if 
there is any pursuit in which his native cussedness 
shows to more advantage than in any other, it is in 
his conduct of a newspaper. By the very nature 
of things, the amateur journalist is almost invariably 
both the proprietor and editor of the sheet in which 
he is interested. In point merely of literary intelli- 
gence and culture I have known specimens of the 
class superior to all but the very best of their pro- 
fessional congeners, but those gifts are of quite 
subsidiary importance in the editorial chair. 
Worthily or profitably to fill that seat demands 
qualities of mind and a general experience of life 
which no amateur can hope to possess, for the 
simple reason that if he possessed them he would 
not want to be an amateur in any line, and least of 
all in journalism. A dilettante commanding a fleet 
in action or an army in the field would be hardly 
a more hopeless futility than one of the same kidney 
in a position of authority in a newspaper office. In 
the first place, no paper run by an amateur can hope 
to possess a competent staff, and this for a double 
reason. The amateur editor does not want a com- 
petent staff. That would mean being snubbed and 
taught his business by his subordinates, and he 
naturally prefers to suck the sweets of the editorial 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 171 

position by dispensing patronage among other 
amateurs. On the other hand, competent journalists 
will not enlist under an amateur editor, who would 
rile every nerve in their bodies all day long by his 
complacent exhibition of ignorance of things the 
very office-boy takes for granted. The one person 
among such a crowd who may be generally relied 
upon to know his business is the cashier, who may 
or may not be an honest man to start with, but who, 
if he remains honest after six months' experience 
of the constant temptations to fraud put in his way 
by his employer's childish ignorance of business, is 
nothing less than a commercial hero. 

To attempt to catalogue the points at which the 
amateur differs from the professional editor would 
be a tedious business. His most exasperating 
peculiarity, in my experience of him, is his utter 
lack of human sympathy with the people whose 
living depends on him. That may seem a harsh 
statement, but it can be justified by simply rehears- 
ing the fashion in which I have been treated by the 
three specimens of the breed I have had dealings 
with. 

In the first case I was acting as the sub-editor 
of a weekly "society" journal, started and edited 
by a young gentleman who had until recently held 
a commission in a cavalry regiment. I used some 
of the experiences gathered in his office as part of 
those happening to George Murdoch as sub-editor 
of Wisdom, in " A Song of Sixpence." On one 
occasion he absented himself from the office for an 
entire month without giving a hint of his where- 
abouts, and without leaving anything more than the 



172 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

petty cash in the business-manager's desk to defray 
the contributors' salaries and the printer's bill. I 
managed, by infinite labour and diplomacy, to keep 
the paper alive during his absence. When at last 
he lounged back into the office I spoke with con- 
siderable heat regarding his conduct. He listened 
with a face of blank amazement. "What did it 
matter ? " he asked. Here he was, ready to pay 
everybody. I told him that what it mattered to 
me was that everything I had in the world except 
the clothes I stood in was in pawn, and that for the 
past three days I had not had a square meal. Then 
a light broke in upon him. " Do you mean to say," 
he said, " that you live on what I pay you ? And 
all the other Johnnies, too ? " I told him that, 
incredible as it must seem, such was indeed the 
case. The statement interested him for the moment, 
but can hardly be said permanently to have enlarged 
his ideas. A month or so later he casually inti- 
mated to me that my services would not be required 
after the end of the coming week. The reason 
given was that at lunch that day he had met one 
Jones — "an awfully nice chap, most disgustingly 
hard up — old school-fellow of mine, don't you 
know " — and had promised him my berth. I 
pointed out that / was an awfully nice chap, that 
I had fulfilled the duties of my position to the best 
of my ability and, so far as I knew, to his complete 
satisfaction, and that to fire me out at a week's 
notice would make me as disgustingly hard up as 
Jones actually was. "But I've promised Jones," 
said my editor. " Don't you see, old chap, what 
an awkward position you're placing me in .'* " I 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 173 

intimated that the position was of his own making, 
and further that I was legally entitled either to 
three months' notice or to my full salary for that 
period. He expressed himself, at great length and 
with considerable force of language, as at once sur- 
prised and wounded at my base commercialism, and 
ended up by magnificently referring me to his 
solicitor. I began an action, but had no funds to 
carry it on, and so permitted it to lapse. This 
person was not a brute. He was not even, intel- 
lectually speaking, a fool. He was simply an 
Amateur Editor. 

My second experience of that kind of person 
occurred several years later. This gentleman was 
not the proprietor of the sheet whose destinies he 
directed. It had been started and originally edited 
by Mr. T. P. O'Connor, and was in his day known 
to an extensive public as the Weekly Sun. By him 
it was sold to a capitalist of vast wealth, who, no 
doubt for his own good reasons, bestowed the 
editorship upon a connection of his, who may be 
here referred to by the title by which he was 
known in the office, "the Doctor." Under his 
auspices the paper fell rapidly into obscurity as the 
Sunday Sun. Its first page was occupied by an 
article entitled " The Book of the Week," and to 
that page I was for three or four years a fairly 
frequent contributor. I do not suppose that my 
criticisms had any great influence on the public 
mind, if for no other reason than that the circula- 
tion of the journal was so small as to make it 
rather wonderful that even the wealthiest of multi- 
millionaires should have thought it worth while to 



174 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

keep it afloat. But they attracted the attention of 
the editors of other papers, and I was on my way 
to establish a good market for my critical wares 
when Nemesis, wearing on this occasion the physical 
semblance of the Doctor, asserted her influence. 
The Doctor, besides editing the Sunday Sun, was 
the managing director of Black and White. After 
paying me many merely verbal compliments on the 
excellence of my work, he proceeded to the practical 
compliment of suggesting that I should enter into 
a six-months' contract to contribute no critical work, 
over my own name, to any but the two journals 
under his control, and that for that term I should be 
the only literary critic employed on either of those 
journals. I accepted the contract, and promptly on 
the day on which the six months expired I was 
informed that my services were no longer needed 
on Black and White, and that on the Sunday Stin 
I reverted to my original position of an occasional 
contributor. No pretence of an explanation of this 
arbitrary proceeding was vouchsafed. My place 
on the journals I had deserted in order to accept 
the Doctor's contract had been of course filled up, 
and the engagement I had looked upon as a really 
brilliant chance was converted into my temporary 
ruin. 

My third experience in this sort happened 
within the last two years. A weekly paper was 
started by a lady — a very great lady indeed, of 
quasi-royal rank. In this case I had no contract 
or engagement, but acted merely from week to 
week as literary and dramatic critic. Presently, 
owing to complications I never understood, and 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 175 

with which I had no personal concern, financial 
difficulties arose. Loyalty to my employers has 
always been a point of pride with me, and I stuck 
to my work at no small inconvenience until my 
account against the paper reached the — to me — 
considerable sum of forty pounds. My loyalty in 
this instance was recompensed by a cheque for the 
amount due to me, accompanied by an intimation 
that my services were no longer needed. A kindly 
caprice of circumstance has of late set me beyond 
the necessity of working merely for the daily crust. 
But, should Fate again prove unkind, I shall need 
the daily crust very bitterly indeed before I seek it 
at the hands of the Amateur Journalist. 

During, and for some time after, the period of 
my engagement with the first of this eccentric trio, 
I was living in Staple Inn, to me a place of many 
memories. My rooms were at the top of Number 
Four, next door to the Hall, and as that was the 
building in which Samuel Johnson is said to have 
lived while writing " Rasselas," I pleased myself 
by the fancy that mine were the actual chambers 
he had occupied. My sojourn there was signalised 
by one curious experience. A group of my 
acquaintances, who lived in the neighbourhood, 
used to meet in the inner bar of a quiet little 
public-house at the corner of Chancery Lane, 
which occupied part of the site now covered by 
one of Pownceby's wine-shops. Among them 
was a young man named Swan, a quiet, studious 
fellow, at that time engaged on the composition 
of an Arab-English Dictionary. Returning one 



176 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

night from a week's stay in the country, I found 
Swan at the accustomed haunt, dressed in deep 
black, and plunged in a state of melancholy in 
painful contrast with his usual placid cheerfulness. 
Inquiry elicited that he had that day attended 
the funeral of his oldest and closest friend, who 
had been his school and college-chum, and for over 
ten years his house-mate in London. " I can't 
tell you," he said, "how I loathe going home to- 
night, and the prospect of waking in the morning 
to see poor old Tom's empty bed in the opposite 
corner of the room. I can't do it — I won't." In 
sympathy with his desolation I volunteered to go 
with him that night, and occupy the vacant bed. 
He was almost ludicrously grateful at the mere 
offer of this small service. In the morning, after 
breakfasting with him, I went to the Inn for a 
shave and a clean shirt. On entering my bed- 
room my heart fairly stood still for a moment. In 
the roof was a huge jagged hole, and on the pillow 
beneath it, exactly on the spot my head would have 
occupied had I been sleeping there, lay an oblong 
mass of stone, weighing at least thirty pounds — 
the coping-stone of a chimney then in process 
of repair. 

On the inner sides of the index and middle 
finger of the hand with which I am writing are two 
small, scarcely perceptible, circular scars, recalling 
to my mind certain events which may find record 
here. Their connection with the first of these 
events will not be immediately apparent to the 
reader, but he will see the nexus presently. I 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 177 

lived for a brief period in a certain set of flats, the 
topography of which does not matter. My modest 
wants were attended to by a girl of about seventeen, 
a pretty, delicate little creature, with an air of gentle- 
ness and of natural refinement not common among 
women of her class, to whom I took a strong liking. 
Without being absolutely mentally deficient, she 
had a curious bluntness of perception, and a quite 
wonderful ingenuity in the perpetration of small 
blunders. I have known her to bring in my boots 
of a morning, one beautifully polished, the other 
encrusted with yesterday's mud. To send her on 
the simplest errand was to court disaster ; and she 
never b}^ any chance correctly reported a verbal 
message. These little lapses were more than 
atoned for by a positively pathetic eagerness to 
be of use. I never met any other creature so 
perfectly describable by the housewife's epithet, 
** willing," and it was no more possible to be angry 
or severe with her than with a bird or a kitten. That 
anything in the normal semblance of a man should 
have wrought harm to so harmless a creature is one 
of the most shocking facts I have encountered on 
my way through life, but a fact it was. The natural 
result of bowelless brutality on the one side and of 
mere ignorant weakness on the other was that the 
poor child bore a baby. It was born in an empty 
set of rooms in the Mansions, and its dead body 
was discovered in the fireplace there a few hours 
later. There was no doubt of its maternity. In 
the quite hopeless hope of being of some use 
to the poor girl, I attended the coroner's inquest. 
I had some slight acquaintance with the doctor 

N 



178 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

who had performed the autopsy. He was a 
red-haired, dour-faced Corkagian, with an accent 
as broad as the Irish Channel. To my huge 
relief, he swore positively that the infant had been 
still-born. We left the Court together, and he 
told me, in the calmest fashion in the world, that 
he had perjured himself — the child had lived at least 
an hour, and had died by suffocation. In answer 
to a not unnatural remark of mine on the reckless- 
ness of this confession to one of whom he knew so 
little he replied, " 'Tis not you that would betray 
me, I'm thinking. I saw your face while I was 
givin' me evidence, and if ye'd come into a fortune 
ye couldn't have looked happier. And if 'tis per- 
jury to save that poor little fool from prison — or 
maybe from the gallows — by Jasus, I ask nothing 
betther than to perjure meself every day I have to 
live." 

Some ten or eleven years later than the date of 
this little story I met this same Irish doctor, of 
whom I had in the interim entirely lost sight. He 
had gone down in the world from a combination of 
causes, and was engaged as manager of one of 
several chemists' shops run by a firm in the East 
End. Since my twentieth year I have suffered at 
odd and quite unaccountable intervals from the 
malady — far more distressing than either actively 
painful or really dangerous — of insomnia. It is a 
peculiarity of my constitution that I am curiously 
insensible to the influence of soporifics, and can 
take with impunity doses of opium and its kindred 
drugs which would kill most people. I was at 
this moment attacked by the most obstinate fit of 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 179 

sleeplessness I have ever experienced, and the day on 
which I stumbled against my old acquaintance was 
the ninth in succession during which I had not known 
one minute of complete unconsciousness, although 
I had been swallowing sulphonal and such-like 
medical sweetmeats by the handful. I told him of 
my condition, and begged him to give me some- 
thing — anything — which would make me sleep. 
He took me to his shop, and there filled for me a 
phial of a salt of morphia — sixty grains weight, as a 
provision in hand against subsequent similar attacks. 
He gave me a scale of doses, of which I took a 
pencilled note. I went home, went to bed, and 
took a dose, which had absolutely no effect. I took 
another, and a third, with a similar result. The last 
post arrived, bringing a letter which informed me 
that a business project which I had regarded, with 
perfectly good reason, as a certainty, had fallen 
through. My torn nerves and battered brain gave 
way under this added stress. I do not think — though 
I am by no means sure — that I had any deliberate 
intention of suicide, but I certainly meant to sleep, 
and whether I ever woke again or not was a quite 
secondary consideration. I flung all that was left 
of the drug — not much short of the original sixty 
grains — into a tankard of beer, drained it, and re- 
turned to bed. I have no memory of lighting a 
cigarette, but when, after many hours of blank un- 
consciousness, I awoke, I found the stump of one 
crushed between my first and second fingers, each 
of which had a hole in it exposing the charred sur- 
face of the bone. Eight-and-forty hours of paralysis 
— I can find no other word to express so complete 



180 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

a loss of muscular power — and of indescribable 
nausea and headache were, in my case, the only- 
results of a dose of poison sufficient to kill thirty 
people of normal constitution. 

It was while "A Song of Sixpence," was going 
its rounds among the publishers that I had my only 
first-hand experience of life in a London hospital. 
I was suffering from a local growth which, though 
not in the least dangerous nor at all painful, it was 
judged necessary to excise, and my friend Oliver 
MacKellar offered me the use of a private room 
in St. Thomas's. That I declined in favour of a 
bed in one of the common wards, which I rightly 
anticipated would yield experiences valuable both 
in themselves and as ** copy." The Sister to whose 
care I was relegated afterwards confessed that she 
had been strongly opposed to this arrangement, as 
"gentleman" patients are not popular in hospital, 
but she owned that her fears had been vain, and 
that I had submitted as perfectly to the necessary 
discipline as any other of the inhabitants of the 
ward. It is an experience which I remember as 
a whole with sincere pleasure. The one thing I 
disliked in the entire business was the taking of 
an anaesthetic, but on that MacKellar insisted, 
and I of course gave way. When the time for 
the operation arrived I was taken into the bath- 
room of the ward, stretched prone upon a table, 
and my mouth covered by an elastic mouthpiece 
communicating with the vessel containing the ether. 
I have never been more intensely awake in my 
life than I was at that moment, and was backing 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 181 

all my will- force and my cultivated power of 
observation against the action of the drug. I can 
remember my sensations up to the moment at 
which I lost consciousness with perfect clearness. 
I lay fronting a large, uncurtained window, looking 
on the roofs of some houses topped by a brilliantly 
clear sky. Quite suddenly, that part of the 
prospect was smitten from my view as completely 
as if a curtain had been drawn before it. I could 
see nothing more distant than the ring of quiet, 
attentive faces, MacKellar's among them, which 
were regarding me. Then they vanished, and my 
vision was bounded by the white, muscular, heavily- 
veined hands of the anaesthetist, which held the 
apparatus to my mouth. They vanished also, and 
I was flying at incalculable speed through limitless 
space of Egyptian blackness, pepper-castered with 
spots and blotches and constellations of intense fire 
which somehow gave no light. My mind was filled 
with wonder at this paradox, wonder which gave 
way to a bewildering exhilaration in the swiftness 
at which I was being shot to some unknown goal — 
something akin, I fancy, to the *' speed-madness " 
to which the weak-nerved motorist is liable. Then, 
the whole universe seemed to blaze into sudden, 
all-enveloping flame — such a coruscation, I should 
imagine, as lights the brain traversed and shattered 
by a bullet ; and then, an insensibility than which 
death itself can know none more complete. 

Slowly, like a diver rising from some vast 
depth of turbid water, I floated back to conscious- 
ness. I was lying in bed, with a woman's face 
bending over me, and yet at the same time I was 



182 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

in the old Independent chapel at home, and the 
congregation was singing "Abide with Me" to 
the strains of the organ. The voices I heard were 
those of the nurses and my fellow-patients, for it 
was now eight o'clock in the evening, and at that 
hour it is customary in each ward to sing a hymn, 
after which silence is proclaimed for the night, and 
the guests of the good St. Thomas address them- 
selves to sleep. 

I awoke early next morning, and watched the 
strengthening sun-rays chase the mist which hung 
above the river, and listened to the chimes of Big 
Ben until he proclaimed the hour of six. At the 
first stroke the silence of the ward was broken by 
a clamour of cheery voices. "Wot ho, Twenty, 
how's the leg, old man ? " " Look ere, Seventeen, 
if you snore agin like you snored last night I'm 
blowed if I don't come and sit on your 'ed ! " 
" Oh, stow it, ye bloomin' old grumbler. Always 
asnipin' at somebody, you are. Puffick disgrice to 
the ward, ain't he, Sister.'*" and so on. I have 
an idea that the lover of his kind who would see 
cockney human nature at its best should seek and 
study it in the wards of one of the great hospitals. 
A resolute cheerfulness, an obstinate determination 
to make the best of the worst circumstances, a 
cheery defiance of pain and of every other kind 
of trouble, a lively sympathy for and interest in 
each others' ailments, and a sincere gratitude 
for the care and skill and tenderness so lavishly 
bestowed on the sufferers, are the dominant notes 
of such a place. 

During my fourteen days' stay in St. Thomas's 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 183 

I got on terms of intimacy with more than one of 
my fellow-patients. One queer character was an 
old peasant, a tough octogenarian who had passed 
over sixty years in London without in the least 
impairing the raciness of the dialect and accent he 
had learned in his native village as a boy. He 
suffered from some cancerous growth in the bone 
of the lower jaw, and had already undergone eleven 
operations, at each of which a bit of bone of the 
thickness of a sixpence had been removed. He was 
inordinately proud of this unique record, and deter- 
mined to improve on it. ** The doctor," he told 
me, "wants I to ha' my jar tuk out, an' have a 
pewter jar put in i'stead, but I doant hold wi' anny 
such blasphemious proceedin'. The Lard give I 
my jar when He med I, and I'm agoin' t' eat my 
vittles wi' un arl the days as I'm let to live." 
Another patient, the darling of the Sister, the 
nurses, and the entire ward, was a little boy of 
about five years old, one of the most beautiful 
creatures it has ever been my fortune to behold. 
He had been born and bred in a slum scarce a 
stone's throw from the hospital, and bore a common 
English name ; but he could hardly have been of 
unmixed English ancestry. His complexion was 
a dark olive lit in the cheeks with a fine orange 
glow ; his immense eyes, of a wonderful depth and 
brilliance, were black as midnight; and he had a 
mass of waving curls as fine and soft as the finest 
silk — a beauty curiously touched, young as he was, 
by that incommunicable air of knowingness and 
furtive, shabby smartness natural to the child- 
cockney — a Velasquez with a dash of Phil May. 



184 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

On the first day of my convalescence I went and 
sat on his bed, and entered into conversation with 
him. "What is the matter with you, my little 
man ? " I asked. " My figh's broke," he answered. 
" That's bad," I said. ** How did you manage to 
do that ? " " Didn't do it. It was faver." " Father ! 
Why, how did he do it ? " " Wiv a poker." " And 
where is your father ? " *• In pizon." " And where's 
your mother?" " Dono. Can you play cat's 
cradle ? " I did not possess that accomplishment, 
and he was good enough to teach me, and was 
extremely impatient at my clumsiness and stupidity. 
I spoke of him to the Sister, asking if, on his 
recovery, he would be re-consigned to the mercies 
of the brute who had lamed him, and was glad 
to hear that another home, in which he would be 
kindly treated and well taught, had been found for 
him, with the full consent of his father, who, being 
approached on the subject, had said that "they 

might roast the little in hell for all that he 

cared." During my time in the place more than 
one child-patient recovered, and was sent howling 
with grief out of the hospital, and back to the 
sordid cellar or squalid garret they had known as 
"home," accompanied by the sorrowing pity of 
every soul in the place ; to exchange the paradise 
of cleanliness, tenderness, loving care, good food, 
sweatmeats, toys, all that children love, for the 
inferno of the London slums. I have seen nothing 
more heartbreaking than those farewells, nothing 
more touching than the kisses and endearments 
by which the nurses strove to soften for those 
desolate little waifs the pang of parting. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 185 

I learned in St. Thomas's a sad little history, 
which was yet not without a sort of melancholy 
charm. One of the patients was an old gentleman 
— I use the word advisedly, for I have seldom met 
a man of finer breeding — who was slowly con- 
valescing after a severe operation. He was allowed 
to rise for an hour or two every day, and during 
that time made himself extremely useful in a quiet 
fashion, doing little services for anybody in need 
of them. He was visited by his wife, as obviously 
a gentlewoman as he a gentleman, and I noticed 
that they both showed much familiarity with and 
a great affection for one of the nurses in the ward. 
She was a grave, quiet-looking woman of early 
middle-age, and, like so many other women of her 
profession nowadays, patently a lady. She bore 
a name uncommon in itself, and occupying an 
honoured place in English history as that of a 
great naval commander. The night before I left 
the hospital the old gentleman and myself were 
enjoying a pipe in each other's society on the 
broad stone balcony at the end of the ward, over- 
looking the river, and he told me the story of which 
I have spoken. Nurse D. was the great-grand- 
daughter of the heroic sailor whose name she bore. 
The teller of the story had, thirty years earlier, 
owned the estate contiguous to that of her father, 
then, as he himself had been, a wealthy man. Both 
families had been ruined, and he, an old and well- 
nigh penniless man, had found his way into the 
hospital in which his old friend's daughter, whom 
he had known in her cradle, and had danced on 
his knee a hundred times, was acting as a nurse. 



186 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

The publication of " A Song of Sixpence " 
brought me some little consideration. It was well 
noticed, and that circumstance, no doubt, helped me 
to get rid of a certain number of short stories at 
what were at that time, and for a writer so little 
known, fairly good prices. The tremendous boom 
in that sort of fiction, which came with the huge 
popularity of Sir Conan Doyle and Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling, was then still, as a leader-writer of a 
certain great London daily once beautifully said, 
** in the uncut leaves of the womb of fate," and 
even the most popular authors did not make much 
by it. I conceived the theme of another novel, 
"A Man of Genius," and worked at it ardently, 
until I received from the late Henry Herman, the 
part-author of "The Silver King" and " Claudian," 
an offer of more immediately remunerative labour. 

Herman was a personality worth dwelling upon 
for more than a mere moment. He was a genius 
manqu^, a spoiled great man, a sort of crippled 
giant. Perhaps his most serious drawback was 
that he had no language to think in. He spoke 
English, French, German, and Italian with pretty 
equal fluency, and all with the same quaint Alsatian 
accent, but he had no literary implement of which 
he was complete master. In my experience, poly- 
glots are always more or less puzzle-headed people, 
and Herman's ideas, always grandiose and some- 
times genuinely poetic, were apt to be somewhat 
formless and inchoate. Cognate with these qualities 
was a wild restlessness of temperament which kept 
him from settling to any definite line of effort. 
His mind was a sort of splendid rag-bag, full of 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 187 

"purple patches," a mental dust-heap which would 
well have repaid the labour of sifting and arranging. 
He had had a vast and various experience of life. 
He was by profession a doctor of medicine. He 
had been a sailor before the mast, a ship's purser, a 
steel engraver, a schoolmaster, a journalist, a hunter 
and trapper, a gold-miner in California, and a silver- 
miner in Colorado. He had fought for the South 
in the American civil war, and had come unscathed 
through nine pitched battles and four forlorn hopes. 
He had lost an eye, it was generally believed in 
action, but the fact was really otherwise. A frag- 
ment of a Northern shell had inflicted a mere 
scratch upon the lower eyelid, which, for lack of 
proper attention, festered and gathered in a painful 
fashion. When at last Herman was able to find 
the regimental surgeon, the latter, who had been 
sawing off arms and legs and performing kindred 
operations for nearly forty-eight hours on end, was 
so drunk with fatigue and sleeplessness, that, in an 
attempt to lance the gathering, he thrust his instru- 
ment into the pupil, and so utterly destroyed the 
sight of the eye. After this accident Herman's 
life became less adventurous, while still remaining 
strangely haphazard and unsettled. For him to 
succeed in any one of the innumerable professions 
to which he turned his hand seemed enough to 
disgust him with it, and to send him off in search 
of some other means of making a livelihood. 

He had been at one period a sworn chemical 
expert of one of the Paris lav/-courts, and apropos 
of that experience used to tell one of the best of 
his inexhaustible store of good stories. He was 



188 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



called as witness regarding the quality of a certain 
brand of wine. Having chemically tested the 
liquor, he went into the box and swore positively 
that it did not contain, among its many constituents, 
one solitary drop of grape-juice. The wine-mer- 
chant was, in consequence, heavily fined. On 
leaving the Court, Herman found the merchant 
waiting for him. He anticipated strife, or at least 
objurgation, but the merchant was perfectly civil, 
and invited him to a glass at a neighbouring cafe. 
At the moment of parting, after a long and friendly 
conversation, the merchant asked, with an admirably 
casual air, " By the way, how was it that you were 
able to swear so positively that there was no grape- 
juice in that stuff of mine ? " " Because," replied 
Herman, "if there had been, in combination with 
the other elements you used, it would have caused 
the formation of tartaric acid on the barrel." 
" Thank you very much," replied the honest 
merchant. " You II find some next time!' 

Herman, myself, and John Cobbe — also, alas ! 
among the departed — once found ourselves together 
in the city of York. We took a walk one day, and 
stopped for luncheon at an hotel in the neighbour- 
hood of the racecourse. It was race week, but 
owing to the singular inclemency of the weather the 
meeting had been a comparative failure in the way 
of attendance. The larder of the hotel was, in 
consequence, greatly overstocked. The three of us 
sat down to a table loaded with a mass of provisions 
which would have satiated the appetites of a 
regiment of Horse Guards — a Gargantuan mound 
of beef, a huge ham, and a turkey, a giant of his 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 189 

tribe, which would have turned the scale at thirty 
pounds. We elected for the turkey. We were all 
reasonably good trenchermen, and all fairly sharp- 
set, but when we had done our best the great bird 
looked as if a few mice had been nibbling at him. 
At this moment a big, gaunt-looking mastiff strolled 
in through the open French window leading to the 
garden, and dumbly appealed to us for alms. 
Herman, in one of the moments of comic madness 
to which he was liable, gave the brute the entire 
turkey. Probably fearing that the gift might be 
withdrawn, he bolted with it down the garden path, 
and leaped the fence into a neighbouring field. 
" That's very funny, no doubt," remarked Cobbe, 
who was a man of business, " but we shall have to 
pay for that bird." " Then we'll haf zome vun vor 
our money," replied Herman. He put the metal 
cover over the empty porcelain dish, and rang the 
bell. The waiter entered. " Take that away," 
said Herman, "and bring some whisky." The 
waiter, a portly, personable, rather muscular-looking 
man, bent over the dish, stiffened his back, and 
lifted — hard. The dish and the cover soared over 
his head like leaves blown by the wind, the former 
smashing to fragments against the wall behind him, 
and the waiter sat suddenly on the floor with a thud 
which shook the building. Herman and Cobbe, 
who sat facing him, kept a perfect and unshaken 
gravity of feature, as if nothing in the least out of 
the common had happened. I was glad that my 
face was turned in the opposite direction. The 
waiter gathered himself up and went away like a 
man somnambulising, and we saw him no more. 



190 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

Another man, whose face was as white as a corpse's, 
and who trembled visibly in vague terror of some- 
thing sudden and painful happening to him, appeared 
with the bill, in which the turkey and the breakage 
figured largely. Herman paid it without a word, 
and we all three lit our cigars and filed out. Pale 
faces peered at us from doorways and corners and 
over the balustrades of stairs, and the population of 
the neighbourhood was congregated in the street 
outside. A considerable deputation followed us 
quite a long distance, loath to lose sight of the 
three miraculous strangers who had devoured a 
thirty-pound turkey, bones and beak and all, and I 
have no doubt that we are the nucleus of a legend 
in the place to this day. 

Many of the experiences which had befallen this 
modern Ulysses were worthy of permanent record, 
and it is a great pity that death at the — for a man 
of his superb physique and indomitable courage — 
early age of sixty should have deprived the world 
of the autobiography he had intended to write. 
Let me rescue one or two events from the complete 
oblivion which might otherwise fall upon them. On 
one occasion he was living in a cosmopolitan camp 
of pioneers, pitched under the shadow of a huge, 
overhanging mountain-side in the State of Arizona. 
There were a few animals among the community, 
a couple of horses, a mule or two, a few mongrel 
dogs, and one cat. On a certain morning the camp 
woke up to find itself deserted by its four-footed 
inhabitants, who were nowhere to be found. Her- 
man convened his companions and addressed them 
to the effect that this desertion was a grim warning 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 191 

which might at any moment be horribly fulfilled, 
and urged them to imitate the behaviour of the 
quadrupeds and forsake the camp. They laughed 
at him, and he went forth alone. He had tramped 
barely five miles, when, with a crash which seemed 
to shake the solid globe, the mountain-side fell 
upon the camp and buried it a mile deep. 

On another occasion he found himself one of 
a similar crowd in some other wild district of the 
then unsettled West. The camp consisted mostly 
of the poorest and most ignorant class of Irishman, 
with a sprinkling of Germans, Italians, Mexicans, 
and Spaniards. One day it was joined by a 
shambling vagabond in whom dim traces of what 
he had once been were feebly discernible through 
layer on layer of failure, drunkenness, and degrada- 
tion. He claimed to be a graduate of the University 
of Oxford, and there could be no doubt that he was, 
or rather had been, a man of real culture and of 
considerable natural talent. He discovered a bed 
of asbestos in the neighbourhood, and out of the 
fibre knitted for himself a pair of socks. Coming in 
to camp one rainy day, he found a number of his 
companions loafing round a fire. He took off the 
socks and flung them on the mass of glowing logs, 
and, when they were dry, put them on his feet 
ao^ain. If his idea had been to astonish his 
ignorant and brutal neighbours he certainly suc- 
ceeded, but hardly to the degree to which they 
succeeded in astonishing him. For within the 
next ten minutes he was hanging by the neck to 
a branch of a big tree, "accused — our learning's 
fate — of wizardry." 



192 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

Is the markedly optimistic temperament neces- 
sarily allied to the superstitious type of mind ? I 
am inclined to answer the question affirmatively, 
for I have never known a very hopeful person who 
was not more or less swayed by signs and omens. 
Herman, whose hopefulness, to one of my some- 
what sombre temper, seemed sometimes little short 
of a happy kind of lunacy, was especially open to 
such influences. He came down to Nice to colla- 
borate with Christie on a novel. It was the seventh 
day of the seventh month of the year when he 
arrived. The carriage in which he had travelled 
on the P. L. M. had been numbered 'j']']. The 
open cab which conveyed him to our villa on Mont- 
boron bore the number 707, and the number of his 
various articles of luggage was seven. This rush 
of coincidences inspired him with the belief that a 
fortune was awaiting him at Monte Carlo, and he 
scarcely gave himself time to swallow a biscuit and 
a glass of wine before he flew thither, accompanied 
by Christie, who — another optimist a oiUrance — 
had caught the infection of his enthusiasm. They 
returned by the early night train — le Train des 
Decaves — without a five-franc piece between them. 
They had played for over two hours, and number 
seven had never once turned up. 

By mining and speculation, and by other means, 
Herman had made several quite respectable little 
fortunes, but an incurable generosity — he would 
have given the hat off his head to anybody who had 
asked for it — and an ingrained contempt of money 
kept him from retaining any of them. The Silver 
King and Claudian were both great successes, and 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 193 

are to-day yielding good revenues to those who 
hold their rights, but to him they brought only brief 
periods of prosperity. At the time at which I am 
now arrived he was at one of his periods of financial 
depression. A certain well-known dramatist had 
recently died, leaving amongst his effects a mass of 
inchoate dialogue and situation — written probably 
many years earlier, before he had mastered the 
practice of his craft — which bore the same relation 
to a drama that a swamp bears to a canal, or a box 
of beads to a necklace. It was bought for a few 
pounds by a speculative manager, and submitted to 
Herman. The latter was at that time suffering 
from some sort of trouble with his one remain- 
ing eye, and asked me to read the MS. to him. 
I did so, and we discussed together its dramatic 
possibilities. We determined that there were pos- 
sibilities in it, and as a result the manager con- 
tracted to pay Herman ^300 and myself ^50 
for our labour in cutting, revising, reconstructing, 
and generally knocking the piece into an actable 
condition, and then staging it. It was to be 
rehearsed for a fortnight, and played for a trial 
week at a provincial town by a company already 
on the road. 

It was produced during a week of blistering 
heat — the worst possible conditions for theatrical 
success. Such audiences as came to see it were 
exceedingly enthusiastic, but the houses were 
dismally thin. Our manager had been doing badly 
for some time past, the week's receipts could have 
been barely sufficient to pay the company's salaries 
and their fares to the next town, and when, on the 

o 



194 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 



Friday night, the manager announced to us that he 
must go up to London to raise the ^350 he had 
promised us, neither Herman nor myself felt very 
sanguine about seeing the money. The curtain 
fell on Saturday's performance, scenery and dresses 
were transported to the railway station, and we saw 
the company off with cheerful faces, hoping against 
hope. But when the last train from London had 
come and gone, and the manager had not put in an 
appearance, things began to look more than a little 
haggard. We had a fortnight's unpaid hotel bill to 
face, and the further question of how to return to 
London took on disquieting proportions. We sat 
together in Herman's bedroom, canvassing ways 
and means, while the bell of a neighbouring church 
tolled one, two, and three o'clock, when suddenly 
a step sounded on the landing, and into the room 
burst the glorious apparition of the manager, waving 
above his head a handful of bank-paper. He had 
missed his train from London by a bare minute, 
and, knowing our necessity, had been almost as 
perturbed as ourselves. Then, as good luck would 
have it, a special train had been ordered by some 
great personage to the identical town he desired to 
reach, and he had secured a place in the guard's 
van. I am happy to state that the piece turned out 
a huge success, is still enjoying a vast provincial 
vogue, and has set the manager on a pinnacle of 
fortune worthy so good a fellow. 

In spite of this and other interruptions the 
composition of my new novel went steadily for- 
ward, and was finished within five months of its 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 195 

inception. It was nearing completion when what 
I at first thought a most encouraging incident 
occurred. I was introduced to a gentleman who 
was on the point of starting a cosmopolitan monthly 
review. He declared himself a fervid admirer of 
such of my work as he had happened to see, and 
learning that I was engaged upon a novel, desired 
to read it so far as it had then progressed. I gave 
the MS. into his hands, he professed himself 
hugely delighted with it, and offered to run it 
through the pages of his review at the rate of ten 
thousand words per month, and at a payment of 
£2 per thousand for the serial right. I acquiesced 
gladly, and dreamed that I had at last found my 
long-sought Mecaenas. Two numbers of the 
review appeared, and then, unhappily, it died. I 
received nothing for the twenty thousand words 
of my novel which had appeared in its pages, 
and had considerable difficulty in rescuing the 
rest of the MS. from the printer, who had not 
been paid either. The one scrap of satisfaction 
I got out of the business came in the form of a 
most generous letter of praise from Hall Caine, 
who at that time I barely knew, but who, by 
some weird chance, had happened on a copy of 
one of the numbers of the review. He remains 
to this day the only person I know of who ever 
heard of its existence. 

By this time the book was finished, and I 
entered on the labour of finding a publisher for 
it. The gods of literature were kinder to me on 
this occasion than in the kindred case of " A 
Song .of Sixpence," and it was rejected by only 



196 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

seven firms. It was ultimately published within 
eighteen months of Its completion by a London 
firm, and I may honestly describe it as a decided 
success. The Press was enthusiastic, and I have 
known few more delightful moments than when, 
a week or so after the book's appearance, I 
stumbled upon a review of a column and a quarter 
in the Standard^ hailing me as a decided acquisition 
to the ranks of contemporary novelists. The Times 
was almost equally warm, the AthencBum^ the 
Pall Mall Gazette^ and other leading journals, 
spoke welcome words of encouragement, and in 
the columns of the Westminster Gazette it was 
made the peg on which to hang a series of 
clever and trenchant articles on the then condi- 
tion of English fiction. Surely, oh surely, my 
chance had come at last ! Alas — 

" Not seldom, dad in radiant hue, 
Deceitfully comes forth the morn." 

Shortly after their production of another novel 
from my pen, written at hot speed to take full 
advantage of my recent success, the personnel of 
the firm underwent a change, with the result that 
both books were nearly as completely lost to public 
knowledge as if they had never been printed at 
all. Once again, therefore, my Nemesis was left 
triumphant. 

Apart from one or two melodramatic pot-boilers, 
the plots of which were conveyed from a set of 
old French plays picked up for a few pence in 
Holywell Street, and which, bad as they were, 
brought me in more money than all my other work 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 197 

in fiction, I made only one more essay at expressing 
myself in that form. I wrote some five-and-twenty 
thousand words of a novel of which the provisional 
title was " A Splendid Fellow." Judging this per- 
formance by what I can still remember of it, I am 
inclined to think it was very much the best thing 
I ever did. It was intended for an intimate analy- 
tical study of a character not unlike that of the 
principal character in my first novel, to whom 
circumstances combined to offer the fullest possible 
play to the utter selfishness and heartless ambition 
which were the keynotes of his character. Under 
the cloak of a fascinating exterior and of a facile 
surface good-nature as genuine as it was shallow, 
my hero was to have proceeded on a brilliant 
and unchecked career of conquest, every step 
in his path to a peerage and the certain prospect 
of Westminster Abbey marked by some master- 
piece of mean and caddish crime. I was in love 
with my theme, and left the personages of the 
story growing under my pen in strength and veri- 
similitude with every passing day. Then, one 
memorable evening, after a day spent in strenuous 
and delightful labour on my magnum opus, I went 
out for a walk. Returning, I chanced to raise my 
eyes to the window of my room, from which, to my 
horror, a snowstorm of paper was issuing. I tore 
into the house and upstairs in tme to rescue the 
last completed sheet of the manuscript of "A 
Splendid Fellow." The rest was circulating over 
the adjacent streets on the wings of the wind — the 
only circulation it will ever know. I accepted the 
incident as a sort of supernatural, final negatur to 



198 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

my ambition as a writer of fiction, and have never, 
since that day, attempted another novel. 

I may as well, while I am about it, make a clean 
sweep of the narration of my misfortunes in the 
merely literary line. In the year 1900, Robert 
Buchanan — of whom I shall presently have a good 
deal to say — was smitten with paralysis. His 
recovery was pronounced to be quite hopeless, and 
on the strength of my long and intimate connection 
with him I was commissioned by a young publisher, 
who had recently started in business, to write a 
critical study of his life-work. Buchanan lingered 
for nine months, and then died with almost startling 
suddenness, and the book was on the market within 
a week or two of his death. It went well, but, 
owing to the publisher's retirement from business, 
it has disappeared from the list of the living as 
completely as the books I have already mentioned 
had done aforetime. 

A year or two later I made a bargain with 
Messrs. Isbister to edit a library of books to be 
called " The Pro and Con Series." Each volume 
was to have consisted of two essays, written from 
diametrically opposite points of view by well-known 
experts on some debatable subject of actual interest, 
such as the Nationalization of Railways and of 
the Land, Capital Punishment, Conscription, the 
Influences of the Turf, Municipal Trading, and the 
like. I entered on the undertaking with a light 
heart, recking little of the huge amount of corre- 
spondence and the number of personal interviews 
its performance would entail, almost all of which 
work was doomed to be wasted. Messrs. Isbister 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 199 

produced one volume of the projected series, that on 
*' Old Age Pensions," and then went into liquida- 
tion. That was five years ago, since when I have, 
so to speak, confined my efforts to the hors d'oeuvres 
of literature. The present volume is an attempt at a 
dish on something like the old scale, and I am put- 
ting in a good deal of time in trying to imagine what 
new trick the literary Fates may have invented this 
time for my discomfiture. Up to date, my account 
with those capricious powers stands as follows : — 

The complete MS. of a novel lost in trans- 
mission through the post. 

A novel rejected by thirty-six publishers and 
ultimately sold for ^lo. 

Two novels and a Critical Biography the 
circulation of which ceased on the changes 
in the firms of their respective publishers. 

A projected series of Sociological Studies 
vetoed by a similar accident. 

Twenty-five thousand words of a novel blown 
through the window. 

A book which I cannot persuade any publisher 
to produce. 

The retirement of John Reid from the editor- 
ship of the London edition of the New York Herald 
and of Sebastian Evans from the editorship of the 
People, the death of the Review in which the first 
twenty thousand words of my story had appeared 
and my adventures with the three Amateur Editors, 
serve excellently as the trimmings to this feast 
of failure. 

A man talking of himself is as a babbling brook, 



200 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

and of his wrongs or his misfortunes, as a rushing 
river. I have not nearly arrived at the end of my 
tale of professional woe, but I should like to pause 
here for a few words of personal explanation. I 
should be sorry if any reader I am fortunate enough 
to find should take this book as the outpouring of 
the gall of an atrabilious grumbler. Writing this in 
the imminent shadow of my fiftieth birthday, and 
recognising — as I may well do — that my chances 
of fame and fortune as a writer have vanished as 
utterly as the snows of yester-year, I am not in the 
least angry or bitter about it. To say that I have 
never known moments of anger or of bitterness 
would be to proclaim myself as something more 
than human. But I have suffered, and suffer, so 
little from the continued and inveterate failure of 
my projects that I am inspired greatly to doubt if 
the most brilliant success would really have brought 
me any such overflowing pleasure as I once believed 
it in its power to give. There may be — there 
certainly are — natures otherwise, and, as I think, 
less happily compact in this respect than mine, 
natures to which success is a ravishing: and intoxi- 
eating wine, and failure a draught of Marah whose 
after-taste is only to be scoured from the loathing 
palate by the tooth of the grave-worm. It is an 
open question whether, in such a world as this, 
where Fortune is rarely regularly kind even to her 
most pampered favourites, 

" Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full 
Out of their choicest and their whitest wool — " 

such a temperament can be altogether a blessing. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 201 

Kicks are commoner than ha'pence to the luckiest 
of us, and it is surely well for a man to be able to 
accept either with a decent indifference. Tennyson 
never saw my face, but he hit me in the bull's-eye 
when he penned the lines he puts into the mouth of 
old Earl Yniol, in " The Marriage of Geraint" — 

" Nor know I whether I be very base 
Or very manful, whether very wise 
Or very foohsh ; only this I know, 
That whatsoever evil happen to me, 
I seem to suffer nothing, heart or limb, 
But can endure it all most patiently." 

Not by any means an heroic temperament, nor one 
that makes a man potent either for good or evil, it 
is one that early learns to smile at all the ills of life 
that fall short of actual tragic dignity. And in other 
respects my fortune has not been all unkind. My 
parents gave me a physical machinery as admirable 

" As I were made and set aside to show — 
The body's habit wholly laudable." 

There are few men of nine-and-forty who can say 
that they have never known a day's serious sick- 
ness, or suffered so much as a headache that they 
have not richly earned. And even failure and its 
consequent poverty are by no means entirely evils. 
For one thing, they teach a man who, among the 
thousands he jostles on the crowded highways of 
the world, are his real friends. The poor man 
knows that the hand offered to him is cordial, that 
he is truly welcome at the board to which he is 
invited, that the wine he drinks there is of an 
honest vintage, and poured out for him with a 



202 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

ready hand and a kind heart. Si je ne stiis pas la 
rose^ fai vkiL bieti pres d'elle — I know many of the 
men whose names ring loudest in the public ear, 
who have made the fame and the money I was once 
so fain to make, and I do not know that they are 
much happier than I, or that, at the final balancing 
of things, I shall have much to envy them. 

I have read much that has been written in 
praise of poverty, but I have nowhere come across 
a statement of certain considerations to which my 
own experience has introduced me. I am not in 
the least trying to be funny or clever at the expense 
of common-sense when I say that it is one of my 
deepest convictions that there is no man now living 
who, not having enjoyed that advantage, would not 
have been hugely improved by a spell — say, twelve 
months — of financial distress as severe as is com- 
patible with safety to life and could be supported 
without permanent injury to health. And I hold 
that statement to be truer the higher may be the 
man's social position, the greater the power he 
wields, the more unbounded the wealth he possesses. 
There is no other experience so splendidly educa- 
tional as for a man to stand in his native nakedness 
and impotence, between the bare earth and the 
bleak sky, and to recognise that whether he lives 
or dies is, of all things in the world, the most 
absolutely unimportant to the world at large. I 
have sometimes thought that no man who has not 
drunk to the dregs that bitter cup of wholesome 
humiliation can be quite perfectly a man. I do not 
know, and cannot conceive, of any really efficient 
substitute for that terrible and fortifying lesson. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 203 

To have come through a storm of fire on a battle- 
field, to have passed days of hunger and despair 
in a small boat on the wide waste of ocean, to have 
forced, or to have failed to force, some great and 
necessary piece of legislation singlehanded down 
the throats of an insubordinate majority, to have 
faced and dominated a mob yelling for one's life- 
blood — such feats as these have been the furnace 
to mould and temper hearts of noble heroism. But 
in the bitter moments they can give, there is a con- 
soling and strengthening dignity. There is nothing 
dignified in being friendless, foodless, and impotent 
in a great city ; and nothing in the least pride- 
inspiring in escaping from such a dilemma — that puts 
you merely on the level of the poorest scavenger 
working in the street. You feel as helpless as an 
unshelled crab on a rock ; very mean, very poor, 
very cheap, as negligible as neglected ; and it is 
very good for you, if you are really a man, and not 
a mere bundle of appetites, lusts, vanity, and self- 
importance, made up to look like one. It gives you 
an amazing relish for the next plateful of victual 
you strike, and — again, if you are a man, and not 
the other thing — it gives you an intense pity for 
those unfortunates who have not touched at the 
Isle of Provant, and are still wandering on the 
desolate waters from which you have escaped. In 
a wisely-ordered State such an experience would be 
insisted on as an indispensable part of the education 
of all potentates of all kinds whatsoever ; all Kings 
or Presidents of republics, all Princes of the Blood 
Royal, all Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, 
Barons, Baronets, heads of State departments. 



204 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

permanent officials, millionaires, editors, journalists, 
authors, publicists, town and borough councillors, 
employers of labour, and members of that vener- 
able, if somewhat mouldy institution, the House of 
Commons — of every person, without exception, 
who claims the smallest authority in any kind of 
public business, or attempts in any way to influence 
public action. Socialism is coming with the inevi- 
tability of death and the accelerating velocity of 
a falling stone, but that one reform would bring 
it with the rapidity of light. The human average 
is on the right side, always and everywhere, and the 
people who rule us are for the most part good men, 
not more selfish or brutal than any similar number 
of people drawn from other ranks. But they do 
not know — they have not acquired that ultimate 
wisdom which nothing but an empty belly can 
impart ; and no man who has never been hungry — 
unless he be a born saint, sage, and philanthropist 
— can make an efficient legislator. 

It was not long after parting with Christie at 
Nice that I made a journalistic liaison which 
resulted, in a rather odd and out-of-the-way fashion, 
in cementing the longest, firmest, and dearest 
friendship of my life. I joined the staff of the 
Hawk, a sixpenny weekly paper run and officered 
by a small crowd of cheery journalistic Ishmaelites, 
of whom one or two, including Augustus Moore 
and James Glover — the latter now and for many 
years past musical conductor at Drury Lane — 
were old friends of mine. It was an impudent, 
irreverent, utterly irrelevant and candidly libellous 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 205 

little sheet, which, by sheer dint of those qualities 
plus a good deal of slangy cleverness, rapidly 
became a power among that curious social 
continofent known as " The Smart Set." Like 
the ideal Christian in relation to this passing 
world, I was rather in the Hawk office than of 
it, having neither the money nor the inclination 
to mix much with the crowd for which the paper 
catered. It had, or professed to have, a serious 
side, and it gave me chances which more ** respect- 
able" journals would never have afforded for the 
plain expression of my convictions on many subjects. 
I have always had a strong dash of V esprit frondeiir^ 
and took full advantage of my liberty. The late 
Harry Quilter had just started his brilliant but 
short-lived Universal Review, and in one of his 
earlier numbers appeared an article by Robert 
Buchanan on " The Modern Young Man as 
Critic," written with all that forthright candour 
which used to mark its author's polemical utter- 
ances. Moore and myself were more or less lids 
with one or two of the people Buchanan most 
pitilessly attacked, and Moore suggested that I 
should reply to the article. The passage in which, 
in my " Critical Appreciation of Robert Buchanan," 
I recounted the incident may as well do duty here. 
" My feelings towards Buchanan at that time 
were of a somewhat mixed description, com- 
pounded of admiration for the genius evidenced 
in his best work and regret that he should so often 
fall below the lofty level which, in his happier 
moments, he attained and kept so easily ; and in 
my criticism of 'The Modern Young Man as 



206 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

Critic* the second of those sentiments certainly- 
found stronger expression than the first. I had 
at that time a tendency, which perhaps even now 
I have not ahogether outworn, to let my pen run 
away with me, and to express the passing mood 
of the moment with unnecessary strength. What 
I said was, as Buchanan himself subsequently 
confessed, true enough, but it was truth savagely 
spoken, and I have to own that the article was 
permeated by a certain air of personal resentment 
quite unjustified by the circumstances of the case. 
My acquaintance with Buchanan was at that 
moment of the slightest, but as the hazards of life 
drew us closer and closer together I regretted my 
virulence more and more, and when, some months 
after the appearance of my ill-tempered article, 
Buchanan, by a most thoughtful and quite un- 
solicited act of friendship, showed how kindly he 
had come to regard me, I felt that the hour for 
full confession had arrived. I wrote to him, 
avowing myself the author of the article and 
apologising more for its manner than its matter. 
His reply was like himself — frank, cordial, generous. 
* Nobody knows better than I how, in these random 
fights of the literary arena, a man loses his temper 
and strikes harder than he need. I have many 
such sins on my conscience. There is really very 
little in your article that you need regret, and 
indeed, knowing how you feel on these matters, 
I do not see how you could well have written 
otherwise. . . . To requite your candour, I was 
fairly certain that you had written the article, and 
quite certain, if my belief was true, that you would 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 207 

sooner or later "own up" to it. Don't avoid me 
like the plague because you have voluntarily gone 
into the confessional, but come up to dinner next 
Sunday and do penance.' The matter was never 
again mentioned between us, and this apparently 
untoward accident was the starting-point of an 
absolutely unchequered friendship of more than 
twelve years' duration. I mention it here only 
because it was so richly characteristic of a side of 
Buchanan's nature which the majority of people, 
knowing him merely from his published utterances, 
could hardly believe him to possess. A man of 
passionately cherished ideals, most of which were 
utterly opposed to the practice of his day ; a man 
who, while he lived, must freely speak whenever 
truth he saw, at whatever cost to the feelings or 
interests of individuals ; he was incapable of the 
least personal malice towards an opponent." 

Buchanan's influence upon my character, my 
outlook upon the world, my entire nature, was 
profound, and will be life-long. It is my most con- 
stant and enduring regret that I did not come into 
intimate contact with him sixteen years earlier, at 
the outset of my active career. This book is a 
record of my own personal experiences, and not a 
detailed study of the lives of other men — an 
autobiography, not a literary cinematograph of 
other personalities. But no man can truly recount 
his own life without telling in part the lives of other 
men, and Buchanan was so cardinal a factor in 
mine, and was, moreover, in himself so interesting 
a figure, that I shall make no apology for presenting 
as clear an idea of the antecedent forces which had 



208 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

made him what he was when I met him as my poor 
skill can compass. 

Perpetually, and at all epochs of his life, it had 
been Buchanan's fortune to be in revolt against his 
immediate surroundings. Born into Robert Owen's 
" New Social World," " nourished," as he himself 
has told us, " on the husks of Socialism and the 
chill waters of Infidelity," having hardly, until at 
ten years of age he went to Scotland, heard the 
name of God, the innate theological leaven which 
was to make him all his life a seeker after some 
divine sanctification of our moral existence worked 
in him from his earliest years. In his " Latter Day 
Leaves " he tells us : " All my experience, my birth, 
my education, my entire surroundings, were against 
the birth or growth of the sweet spirit of natural 
piety ; all the human beings I had known or 
listened to were confirmed sceptics or boisterous 
unbelievers. Yet while my father was confidently 
preaching God's non-existence, I was praying to 
God in the language of the canonical books. I 
cannot even remember a time when I did not kneel 
by my bedside before going to sleep, and repeat 
the Lord's Prayer. So far away was I from any 
human sympathy in this foolish matter, that this 
praying of mine was ever done secretly, with a 
strong sense of shame and dread of discovery." 
The elder Buchanan's friends, Lloyd Jones, Archi- 
bald Campbell, William Turvey — names which are 
not even names to the present generation, which 
cares for as little as it knows of the debt it owes to 
them and their intellectual kindred — were apostles 
of free-thought, of which he was himself, in his day, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 209 

an enthusiastic advocate. Not merely in pious 
Glasgow, but throughout Great Britain generally, 
men of such views were, at that time, social out- 
casts, shunned and boycotted by all respectable 
people. In her biography of Buchanan, Miss 
Harriett Jay tells us : " The poet's father was an 
object of special detestation, and he himself, as the 
son of a notorious unbeliever, was very early 
taught the lesson of social persecution. If he made 
an acquaintance of his own age, that boy was 
generally warned against him and taught to give 
him the cold shoulder. * Don't play with yon 
laddie,' the boys would say, 'his father's an 
infidel.* Ridiculous as the record of this persecu- 
tion may appear, it caused the lad at the time a 
great deal of misery, and later on, when we spoke 
together of those days of his youth, he assured me 
that many a time he had prayed with all his 
soul that his father would mend his ways, go to 
Church, and accept the social sanctities like other 
men." 

This bitter apprenticeship had its results, read- 
able alike in his life and in his work. The chilly 
atmosphere of atheism revolted him, and he 
escaped from it — entirely for a brief time, though I 
doubt if after he took to the study of modern 
thought, as expounded by Spencer, Huxley, 
Haeckel, and Buchner, there was ever a moment in 
which he felt complete certainty of God or of 
eternal life. His brain and heart were at odds 
upon the question, and remained to the last 
unreconciled. That life-long struggle and the 
vivid memory he retained to the last of his childish 

p 



210 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

unhappiness, which might have soured or hardened 
a poorer nature, were to him influences almost 
purely beneficent. He learned in suffering what he 
taught in song, and not only in song but in daily 
word and deed : a large tolerance of all forms of 
doubt and belief, an abiding sense of the sacredness 
of that inner light which every thinking man must 
kindle and tend within himself. His obstinate 
clinging to a religious scheme of which he came 
to see clearly the logical weakness was in no 
small measure and to a great degree unconsciously 
the result of his poetic temperament. Christianity 
and many of its corollaries were aesthetically 
beautiful to him. Miss Jay tells how he loved the 
sound of church bells, and the reading of the 
passage vividly recalls one summer Sunday morn- 
ing in the country, when we lay sheltered from the 
brilliant sunshine by the branches of a huge elm, 
listening to the mingled music from the spires of 
half a dozen adjacent villages. " What will life be 
worth when that is heard no more ? " he asked. 
His sense of abiding kinship with those he loved 
was a deeper reason for his obstinate clinging to 
the hope of immortality. It was so strong and 
militant that at moments its angry revolt seemed 
to conquer his intellect completely. As Tennyson 
has it — 

" Like a man in wrath, the soul 
Stood up and answered, ' I have felt ' ! " 

" I don't care a curse for your ' scientific evidence,' " 
I have heard him say to a friend with whom he was 
disputing. " It isn't thinkable that I should not 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 211 

meet certain people again. I must meet them, and 
I know that I shall.'' He would not admit at such 
moments that his intense longing for the society of 
his lost friends was no proof of the validity of his 
hope, nor that future generations, nourished in the 
Thanatist creed, would accept eternal separation 
with none of the pangs he suffered. " They will 
lose more than they will gain," was his reply to 
such attempts at consolation. "It is only the 
certainty of an immortality to be shared with the 
souls we love that can give such a wretched busi- 
ness as life the smallest value. If this existence is 
all, it is not worth a burned-out match." 

" Our friends and our enemies," says Thackeray, 
with his own easy and delightful cynicism, "both 
paint our portraits, and both portraits are like us." 
That is true as a general statement, but like most 
other general statements it has its exceptions, and 
the most glaring exception I have ever known was 
furnished by Robert Buchanan. The portraits of 
him painted by his enemies were ludicrous carica- 
tures, or rather, clumsy libels, for caricature is only 
worthy of the name when it depends on the wilful 
distortion of some really characteristic feature, and 
is recognisable without having the name of its 
alleged original displayed in large letters on the 
frame. I have listened on many occasions to views 
of Buchanan's character, and more — to personally 
guaranteed excerpts from his biography — which, in 
their ludicrous falseness to the very groundwork of 
his being as I intimately knew it, remain among the 
most marvellous utterances I have ever heard from 
human lips. Such libels on his character and 



212 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

travesties of his actions were, in the cases I refer 
to, invariably the utterances of people absolutely 
unacquainted with him, but that such legends should 
have been invented and should have gained the 
smallest degree of currency was typical of much. 
It was the result of the bitterness which charac- 
terised the literary quarrels of the older generation, 
as evidenced in the furiously indecent diatribes of 
the earlier writers for the Quarterlies and " Black- 
wood's." Buchanan's onslaught on the reputation 
of certain pets of the critical Press — e.g. Messrs. 
Swinburne and Rossetti — and on certain powerful 
journalistic cliques, had begotten a passion of hatred 
in the breasts of the smaller partisans of the people 
he attacked, who found no aspersion too foul for the 
disturber of the feast of mutual flattery. A legend 
sprang up, a sort of" archetypal " figure was invented, 
horrific as the horned and tailed devil of the 
mediaeval Christian. We are more tolerant, per- 
haps because less in earnest, nowadays, and look 
back with wonder on the fashions of conducting 
disputes which, even to our fathers, seemed natural 
enough. 

Mark Twain somewhere remarks that " the 
principal difference between a cat and a lie is that 
a cat has only nine lives." An exemplification of 
this great truth may be found in the fashion in 
which certain legendary misstatements regarding 
Buchanan's once-famous article on " The Fleshly 
School of Poetry," published in the Contemporary 
Review, still pass from mouth to mouth. Mr. J. 
Comyns Carr's recently-published volume, "Some 
Eminent Victorians," and the article headed 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 213 

" Anonymous " in the current edition of Chambers's 
Encyclopaedia, both contain garbled statements 
regarding that effusion. It is, or should be, per- 
fectly well known that the signature of ** Thomas 
Maitland " was appended to the article, not by 
Buchanan, but by the editor of the Review. The 
statement that in the body of that article Buchanan 
had anonymously puffed his own compositions, could 
be repeated only by deliberate malice or by igno- 
rance of the article itself. That article contains an 
imaginary cast of a performance of the tragedy 
of Hamlet by a company of contemporary poets, 
Tennyson figuring in the title-part, and Buchanan 
as " Cornelius," a " super," who, in the first act, 
speaks in a kind of brief duet with the scarcely 
more important character, "Voltimand," one single 
line addressed to the King — 

" In that, and all things, will we show our duty." 

That was the only reference, either to himself or 
his work, made in the entire article. These facts 
have been stated a score of times before, and will 
probably need to be stated as often again. 

Buchanan was constitutionally passionate and 
occasionally wrong-headed. He cherished ideals 
which were often impracticable, and other ideals 
to whose fulfilment he himself frequently failed to 
attain. He occasionally allowed his pen to run 
away with him, and expressed the passing mood of 
the moment with needless strength. In a word, he 
was human, and had the defects of his qualities. 
But the defects, like the qualities of which they 
were the shadows, were essentially those of a strong, 



214 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

honest, fearless man, and he never shrank from 
" owning up " when he felt that the heat of conflict 
had made him intemperate and unjust. Perhaps 
the most illuminating words I have ever read on this 
aspect of his character are contained in the chapter 
contributed to Miss Jay's " Biography " by Mr. 
R. E. Francillon : " The right reading of Buchanan 
was, I am convinced, that his very genius had 
prevented him from outgrowing, or being able to 
outgrow, the boyishness of the best sort of boy ; 
while too many of us only too quickly forget what 
any sort of boyhood means. And the grand note 
of the best sort of boy is a sincere passion for justice, 
or rather a consuming indignation against injustice 
— the two things are not exactly the same. The 
boy of whatever age can never comprehend the 
coolness with which the grown-up man of the world 
has learned to take injustice as part and parcel of 
the natural order of things, even when himself the 
sufferer. The grown-up man has learned the sound 
policy of not sending indignation red-hot or white- 
hot to the post or the press, but of waiting till it is 
cool enough to insert in a barrel of gunpowder with- 
out risk of explosion. But the boy rebels, and, if 
he be among the great masters of language, hurls 
it out hot and strong, in the full belief that no honest 
feelings could be so weak as to be wounded by any 
honest words. Of course he was wrong. Complete 
honesty is perfectly compatible with even abnormal 
thinness of skin, and with an even exceptionally 
plentiful crop of corns. He would often have been 
amazed and shocked could he, to whom hard hitting 
was so easy, have estimated the effect of his blows. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 215 

I do not believe Robert Buchanan to have been 
capable of a malign or vindictive thought ; I know 
that I never heard him utter an unkindly word. I 
wish, above all else, that those who thought of him 
as I had thought of him before knowing him could 
have met him at home — Strasz-Engel, Haus-Teufel 
(' Street Angel, House Devil,' say the Germans) — 
not that they have any monopoly of the experience. 
I have never heard the natural converse of the 
saying, but it is impossible to think of Buchanan 
without its suggestion." 

Perhaps Buchanan did himself most harm, not 
by exposing the faults of men of real value, but by 
castigating the offences and ridiculing the preten- 
sions of the smaller fry of literature and criticism. 
As he wrote in The Outcast : — 

"I've often, vexed by shrill annoys, 
Birched Art's precocious little boys." 

It would have been very much better to have left 
such a task to other hands. Such small fry are 
as dangerous as hornets if provoked, and may be as 
useful as bees if fed and flattered, or even if left 
alone. It is not the £'ros bonnets of the Press, the 
stately three-deckers of literature and criticism, 
which it is principally the astute man's business to 
conciliate. It is the journalistic cock-boat which 
swarms on the waters of the Press which does the 
real execution. As many a beautiful and fertile 
island owes its existence to the incessant efforts of 
millions of scarce-perceptible insects, so many a 
great reputation has been steadily and solidly built 
by the animalculse of journalism. Years before a 



216 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

certain enormously popular novelist had attained 
to his present pride of place I prophesied his 
triumph, from the simple circumstance that when- 
ever business took me to his place of residence I 
found him surrounded by a crowd of journalistic 
wirepullers, individually of small account, but with 
strength enough in their mass to create any number 
of literary reputations. Some day, no doubt, these 
scribbling condottieri will find their general. A 
man clever enough to form such a mob into a 
disciplined and obedient regiment could become 
a veritable artistic kingmaker, and might die worth 
any amount of money. Balzac's immortal " Treize " 
would not be "a circumstance" compared with such 
a federation. Quite seriously, I see no impossibility 
in the suggestion, and recommend it to the attention 
of any reader who believes himself to possess a turn 
for business organisation, Buchanan never could 
be persuaded either to conciliate such people or to 
let them alone. The truth is, he loved a fight, and 
if there happened to be no single opponent in the 
field worthy of his steel he was not above charging 
and slashing among the horde of penny-a-liners. 
He seemed to say, with old Ruy de Silva in 
" Hernani " — 

" Etes-vous noble ? Enfer ! 
Noble ou non, pour croiser le fer avec le fer 
Tout homme qui m'outrage est assez gentilhomme." 

Which was magnificent, but not war as wise men 
make it. 

The period of my more intimate acquaintance 
with Buchanan came about in a fashion characteristic 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 217 

of the somewhat " casual " natures of both of us. 
I had been for some time a frequent visitor at 
his house and guest at his table when, originally 
with the purpose of doing with him some piece of 
work which somehow never got done, I became an 
inmate under his roof. I went there for a day or 
two, like Ned Strong to Clavering Park, in " Pen- 
dennis," and stayed there nearly two years. When 
from time to time I mooted the subject of my 
departure Buchanan would not hear of it, and I am 
glad to believe that his constant asseveration that I 
was of great use to him was more or less really true, 
though a third person might often have been excused 
for wondering in what the use consisted. The only 
joint work bearing our joint names we ever issued 
were the novelised version of his Haymarket play, 
The Charlatan^ and the comedy, A Society Butterfly^ 
produced at the Opera Comique, and of which the 
history shall presently be given. My real utility 
was as an intellectual strop and chopping-block. 
Buchanan was in certain respects, and apart from 
his warm domestic affections, a lonely man. He 
had never been, nor cared to be, popular with the 
bulk of men of anything like his own intellectual 
rank. I have seen but few people under his roof 
whose names were known outside the circle of their 
personal acquaintance. Herbert Spencer, of whom 
I have already spoken, I saw there only once. 
Hall Caine, then a young man just beginning to 
rise above the literary horizon, came occasionally. 
That old-time actor, the late John Coleman, who in 
his ingrained staginess of voice and manner suggested 
Mr. Crummies, and in his lightning alternations 



218 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

between the depths of despair and the summits of 
irrational optimism recalled Mr. Micawber, was a 
more frequent figure. During his term of collabo- 
ration on Adelphi melodrama with Mr. George R. 
Sims he naturally saw a good deal of that genial 
jester, who could keep him in roars of laughter for 
hours at a time. The good things Sims said at 
Buchanan's supper-table were infinite in number, 
and among the best was one at my expense. I had 
been holding forth with most convincing eloquence 
regarding the condition of English fiction, and pro- 
claiming the absolute necessity, if the art was not to 
sink wholly beneath contempt, of a fuller and more 
fearless treatment of sexual problems, when Sims 
shot my rhetoric dead by interjecting the heartless 
remark — " Murray's Guide to the in-Continent." 

For years Buchanan had never possessed a male 
friend with whom he could be at his intellectual 
ease, who was interested in the problems of life and 
thought which most deeply interested him, and the 
fact that on every conceivable issue our views were 
diametrically opposed, and that we were both tough 
and enduring disputants, made me, I fully believe, 
a rather valuable companion to him. Scores of 
times the morning light surprised us in the midst 
of some interminable argument, and if, as was 
certainly the case, I was greatly the gainer by our 
interchange of thought, I gave back the best I had. 
During those two years of intimacy I came to know 
him more completely than I had ever known any 
other human creature with the exception of my 
brother Christie, and I am absolutely sincere in 
saying that he was, quite beyond comparison, the 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 219 

best man I have ever known — the bravest, the most 
honest, the most cordial, the most kindly, the wisest 
in counsel, the readiest in help. There was not in 
his heart one hint of malice, nor in his blood one 
black drop against any creature in the whole round 
world. The only approach to a disagreement we 
ever had together was when he remonstrated with 
me apropos of an assault I had made on a writer 
who had some little time previously assaulted 
Buchanan himself on no provocation whatsoever 
and with unmeasured virulence. " For God's sake," 

he wrote, ** leave alone. People who know 

of our friendship will think you are abusing him to 
please me. And you are unjust — more unjust than 
I was when I answered him. The man has done 
good stuff, and you only stultify yourself when you 
deny his merit." A life of incessant conflict can be 
good for no man, but no man born to such a life 
was ever less injured by it than Buchanan. I have 
read somewhere a story of some hard-fisted old 
Baresarker who, having knocked his enemy into a 
turbulent river, jumped in and fished him out at the 
imminent peril of his own life. That was the sort 
of double feat of which Buchanan was eminently 
capable. 

It was a common sentiment regarding him, and 
one which finds utterance in Miss Jay's "Biography," 
that Buchanan's connection with the theatre was, 
from the view-point of his higher moral and mental 
interests, a mistake. I cannot think so. As is 
often, though by no means invariably, the case with 
men of his type, he added to his intellectual Ish- 
maelism the sunnier temperament of the born 



220 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

Bohemian. He loved life : his nature demanded 
warm human contact, and he found both abundantly 
in the theatre, which, "respectable" as it has 
become of late years, is yet, and by its very consti- 
tution must for ever remain, the one impregnable 
citadel of social freedom. And he needed money. 
Personally a Spartan, with absolutely no expensive 
desires until, rather late in life, he tasted the 
pleasures of the Turf, he wanted money wherewith 
— literally — to live, to express the bubbling gene- 
rosity of his temperament. He had spent the years 
most men spend in the pursuit of pleasure " sitting," 
as he himself expressed it, " empty-stomached on 
Parnassus," and when at last he descended from 
that dignified but rather comfortless altitude into 
the city streets he found the life there, in spite of 
its many horrors and squalors, good, sweet, fit on 
the whole for a man to live among and enjoy. 
That his stage work was coarse and poor contrasted 
with his verse is true enough. But it should, in 
plain justice, be recognised that here, as elsewhere, 
the duality of his nature asserted itself, and that the 
cheap sentiment of the Adelphi and the frivolity of 
the Vaudeville never either contaminated his more 
serious effort nor choked the springs of loftier 
thought. Read consecutively, Buchanan's output 
gives us the clearest mental image of a strenuous 
mounting of the slippery crags of artistic achieve- 
ment. The City of Dream, Mary the Mother, The 
Devil's Case, The Outcast, were all written during 
the period of his dramatic activity, and their artistic 
value is high, and their inspiration sprang, crystal 
pure, from the deepest wells of the poet's moral 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 221 

being. He touched pitch — if the writing of popular 
drama be to touch pitch, which I for one most 
resolutely deny — and was not defiled. He mingled 
with the sharpers of theatrical finance and with the 
moral riff-raff of the Turf, and neither could leave a 
fleck upon his honesty nor on his enduring con- 
viction of the inherent Tightness of human nature. 
He was indeed himself the Archetypal Poet of 
whom he wrote : — 

" Who, 'spite the bitter fight for bread, 

'Spite Samson's mill-work blindly done, 
'Spite piteous tears in secret shed, 
Still kept his forehead to the sun." 

Mr. Israel Zangwill shed a welcome ray of light 
on Buchanan's personality when he wrote : " The 
mistake people make about Buchanan is that they 
think that there is only one of him. There are at 
least a score of Buchanans, and most of them have 
not even a nodding acquaintance with the others." 
As a pendant to that brilliant bit of analysis let 
me recount an incident from my recollections of 
Buchanan's Turf career. It was at a time when he 
was amassing material for a study of the life of 
Christ. I found him standing in the middle of 
Tattersall's ring, absorbed in the study of his Greek 
Testament, perfectly oblivious of the life about him 
until, at the warning clangour of the saddling-bell, he 
restored the volume to his pocket, marking his place 
with a tip-telegram, and plunged amid the roaring 
"pencillers," as eager for the fray as any one 
among them. It was at once one of the quaintest 
oddities of my experience and a wonderful touch of 
unconscious self-portraiture. 



222 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

We had been occupied one day in turning over 
an old trunk full of disjecta membra, such as every 
busy literary workman is sure to accumulate, and 
had come across an incomplete first act of a comedy, 
written some years previously. It bore no name, and 
was in a quite inchoate condition. At Buchanan's 
request I read it, and gave it as my opinion that 
it was worth knocking into shape and completing. 
We were rather languidly discussing its possibilities 
when I chanced upon a paragraph in one of the 
daily papers to the effect that Mr. George 
Edwardes had offered Mrs. Langtry her own 
terms to appear as a dancer at the Empire. This 
gave me a notion of how the idea of the piece might 
be put to immediate profit, and with Buchanan's 
consent I at once took a cab to Pont Street and 
interviewed the lady, with whom I had already a 
slight but friendly acquaintance. Mrs. Langtry 
laughed at the rumour — she was far too ambitious 
of the legitimate laurels of the regular stage to 
compromise her hopes by accepting such an offer — 
indeed, I have an impression that the report was 
altogether unfounded, and that the proposition had 
never been made at all. I then suggested to her 
that it might prove a strong attraction if she would 
consent to appear in a piece of which the principal 
clou should be a scene in which she danced — such a 
scene, for instance, as might take place at a great 
country-house at which the guests should get up a 
mimic realisation of a London music-hall to take 
the place of the ordinary ** private theatricals." 
Mrs. Langtry grasped the idea at once, and Buchanan 
and I set to work on the piece, for which we 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 223 

hit upon the title, A Society Butterfly. Mrs. 
Langtry Hked the piece so well that she would 
gladly have financed it herself, and looking back 
on what actually happened I am sorry that that 
arrangement was not adopted. But Buchanan's 
fortunes were desperate, and we determined to 
float the venture by forming a syndicate, the piece 
representing our contribution to the capital, and we 
taking half the profit. The syndicate, when formed, 
consisted of four members besides ourselves. One 
of them was a lady who appeared in the cast, and 
another a gentleman, at that time a conspicuous 
figure in the City, and at this moment working out a 
sentence of two years' hard labour. Whatever may 
have been his failings in other directions, with us 
he was perfectly square and above-board, which is 
more than can be said for two other members of the 
syndicate, who reduced every shilling they advanced 
to less than half its value by unbusiness-like delay 
and irritating interference. 

One of our earliest necessities was, of course, 
the finding of a suitable theatre. A certain com- 
modious house in the West End had been vacant 
for some months past, and we determined to apply 
for it, and wrote with that object to a lady, cele- 
brated some years earlier as a beautiful and accom- 
plished actress, who was known to all London 
as the sole proprietor of the building in question. 
We received an answer from the lady's solicitors, 
referring us to her husband. We called upon the 
gentleman, and the consequent interview was one 
of the quaintest bits of comedy I remember. He 
was a long, lean, hard-bitten old Scotsman, with a 



224 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

truly wonderful resemblance to a deerhound — I 
have seen dogs of that breed that might have sat 
for his portrait — and he had an accent with which 
phonetics would wrestle in vain. ** Ye want to tak 
the theeter ? " he said. " Ay ! Weel, the rent is a 
thoosand puns pair week, the tenant tae provide 
gahs, eelectreeceetee, an' watter." Buchanan ex- 
plained that we were not, for the moment, buying 
theatres, and that all we wanted just then was to 
hire one. "Ay," said the old gentleman. **Ah 
ken pairfectly weel what ye want. Those are the 
tairms " — and he repeated them. *' And who do 
you suppose is going to pay such terms ? " asked 
Buchanan. *' Nae leevin' cratur, ootside o' Bedlam. 
Ye see," he continued, with a dry twitch of the lips 
which appeared to be the nearest approach to a 
smile of which he was capable, " Ah built yon hoose 
as a bairthday present for my wife, an' med it ower 
till her by a deed o' geeft in the strectest legal 
forrm. But, not havin' takken final leave o' ma 
beesiness senses, Ah pit in a clause to the effec' that 
Ah was to hae the lettin' o't at ony rent Ah thocht 
rizzonable at ony given moment. Sax months syne 
her leddyship and I had a wheen pickle meesunder- 
standin', an' she tuik hersel' afif to Pawris. The 
theeter was lat, an' the rent was paid till her as 
pair contrac'. Then the run o' the piece feenished, 
the tenancy detairmined, and Ah'm askin' the tairms 
Ah tauld ye. Ah'm thinkin' it likely my wife'll be 
back in the coorse of a week or twa." We left the 
old gentleman with a strong sense of his powers as a 
domestic diplomatist, and ultimately took the Op6ra 
Comique, for which we paid ^60 per week, nearly 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 225 

half of which was made up to us by the rent of the 
bars, sublet to a speculating firm of caterers. 

The Opera Comique has disappeared from the 
face of London, so nothing I can say about it now 
can hurt anybody's pocket or anybody's feelings. 
It was, during its existence, a house of mixed 
fortunes. It had held great successes at odd times, 
among which it will suffice to mention Trial by 
yury, The Sorcerer^ Ariane, As in a Looking- 
glass y and Joan of ArCy but it had also known 
long periods of failure, and it was at such a time 
that we succeeded in obtaining the lease at so low 
a rental. Theatrical managers and speculators are 
— with the possible exception of publishers — more 
dominated by superstition than any other class of 
people in the world, and I met plenty of folk who 
took it for granted that in leasing the Op6ra 
Comique we had reduced failure to an absolute 
certainty. Fail we did, as the sequel will show, 
but our failure was not in any sense the fault of the 
theatre. It never is. Years earlier, I had heard 
Augustus Harris sum up and terminate a discussion 
on that subject one evening at the Greenroom 
Club, in his usual trenchant style. " Unlucky 
theatres be damned ! Get the right piece and put 
the right people into it, and the public will tumble 
over each other to get there, if you produced it up 
in the ball of St. Paul's or down in the sewers." 
Harris had a right to speak, for Drury Lane, which 
under his management was a veritable gold mine, 
had been a synonym for failure for years before 
he took it. One of my few wealthy acquaint- 
ances, who had backed more than one preceding 

Q 



226 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

manag-ement, used to say that he never passed 
down Catherine Street without feeling a pain in his 
cheque-book. I am old enough to remember all 
Belgravia and Mayfair crowding to the Phil- 
harmonic, which occupied in Islington part of the 
site now covered by the Grand Theatre, and was 
known by the excellently-descriptive cognomen of 
"The Dust Hole," when Ginevieve de Brabant, 
one of the first specimens of Opera Bouffe seen in 
England, was produced there. There is not a theatre 
in London of twenty years' standing which has not 
known similar fluctuations of fortune. People said 
openly that Mr. — now Sir — John Hare must be mad 
to spend hundreds of pounds in renovating the 
Globe — another vanished theatrical landmark. Yet 
the Globe had in its time held yo, Les Cloches 
de Corneville, The Private Secretary, Charley s 
Aunt, and a dozen other huge successes ; and Sir 
John's production there of The Gay Lord Quex 
was one of the biggest hits of recent years. 

Augustus Harris was altogether too remarkable 
a personality to be passed over with a casual 
mention. My connection with him was never 
really intimate, but we were friendly acquaintances, 
and something more than that, for several years. 
Such intimacy as we had together began a little 
unpropitiously. The World, his first production at 
Drury Lane, and one which has never been sur- 
passed in the peculiar features of the class of melo- 
drama with which he was associated, was in the 
early nights of its hugely successful run when I 
turned up at the theatre one evening accompanied 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 227 

by a friend. I have learned since that it is not 
considerate to ask for " paper " for a declared 
success, but I was in the first flush of my short- 
lived happiness and importance as a critic of a 
London daily, and had a sort of unformulated 
conviction — which some critics seem to retain their 
whole lives long — that it should be the joy and 
pride of any manager to give me anything in that 
way I cared to ask for. Harris was standing 
beside the box-office, and I made my appeal to 
him personally for a couple of stalls. He set his 
thumbs in the armholes of his dress waistcoat — a 
favourite gesture — and replied, "My dear Henry 
Murray, would you like to put your hand in my 
pocket and take out a guinea ? " Somewhat nettled, 
I replied to the effect that I had known the time, 
and that not so long ago, when the feat would have 
been impossible, and was turning away when he 
drew me back with a laugh, and gave me the 
vouchers with so charming a good temper that I 
repented me of my ill-natured retort. We got on 
together excellently afterwards, and he showed the 
kindness with which he regarded me on more than 
one occasion, and in his own peculiar fashion. I 
was sitting one night in the rotunda at Drury Lane, 
plunged in a brown study, when I became aware of 
somebody regarding me. Looking up I recognised 
Harris. ** What are you looking so rotten miserable 
about ? " was his greeting. I replied that I had 
not known that I did so look. " What's the 
trouble ? " he continued ; and went on without 
waiting for an answer, " There's only one trouble 
in the world that matters — money. Would twenty 



228 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

pounds do you any good ? " " Do you know any- 
body it wouldn't do good to ? " I asked in return, 
perhaps a little crustily, for I thought of course that 
he was merely chaffing me. " A civil question 
deserves a civil answer," said Harris, and repeated 
his query. I naturally replied, " Yes." " Then 
come along and you shall have it," he said, and 
in the calmest fashion led the way to his office, 
where he made out and handed to me a cheque for 
the amount mentioned. I never knew, and never 
shall know, his motive, if it was not sheer kindness 
of heart rather eccentrically exhibited. On another 
occasion I called on him on some matter of business 
at his house in St. John's Wood. At the end of 
our interview, he said, ** This is my birthday. What 
have you brought me ? " I replied that being 
ignorant of the occasion I had nothing to offer but 
the customary good wishes. ** That won't do," he 
said. " This is my birthday, and gifts must pass ; 
so, if you won't give me anything, I'll give you 
something." He presented me with a box of a 
hundred excellent cigars and a pretty little silver 
cigarette-case, the latter of which was filched from 
my pocket in the street less than a week after. 

That he was not merely generous, but genuinely 
tender-hearted, was proved to me by an odd little 
incident. He was made one of the sheriffs for the 
County of London, and on the day on which the 
appointment was gazetted I met him at the theatre. 
The piece then running was A Sailor and his Lass, 
by Buchanan and Miss Harriett Jay, and its last 
act contained a gruesome scene, in which the hero 
— a part played by Harris himself — wrongfully 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 229 

convicted of murder, performed his last toilet in the 
condemned cell in Newgate, and was then strapped 
by the executioner previous to passing on to the 
gallows. The accuracy of some details of the scene 
had been questioned by one or two of the papers, 
so, after congratulating Harris on his elevation to 
civic dignity, I jestingly added that the next time 
he needed to reproduce such an effect he would 
probably have actual personal experience to go 
upon. " What do you mean ? " he asked in a 
startled voice. I explained that the sheriffs took 
it in rotation to superintend executions taking place 
within the sphere of their duties, and that on the 
doctrine of averages he would pretty certainly be 
called upon to witness the extinction of at least one 
criminal during his year of office. " / see a man 
hanged!" he exclaimed. "Not for the Bank of 
England ! I'd rather throw up the berth — I'd 
rather be hanged myself ! " I have seldom seen 
a man more relieved than he was at my explaining 
that he could always employ a deputy, and that 
there would not be the least difficulty in finding one. 
Harris was a king of managers and producers, 
and I do not believe that any man that ever lived 
could have taught him his business. His recipe 
for concocting the huge spectacles by which he 
made his name and his fortune was beautifully 
simple. " There are three things," he once said 
to me, "that the great British public cares for — 
love, the Turf, and battles. You can get a good 
piece out of any one of 'em, but mix 'em, and you've 
got the public by the short hairs." I am not much 
of a theatre-goer in these latter days, and can say 



230 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

little of the autumn dramas recently produced at 
Drury Lane from actual experience, but I have 
never seen a detailed notice of one of them which 
has not suggested Augustus Harris floating, a sort 
of tutelary spectre, above the heads of the collabo- 
rators whose names figure on the bill. 

He was a man who did everything greatly, and 
indulged in both work and pleasure on the gigantic 
scale. I shall never forget the first time I saw him 
eat. I had wandered into the stalls of the Adelphi 
during a performance of The English Rose, He 
was in a box, in which he signalled to me to join 
him. We saw the performance out together, and 
crossed the Strand to the Tivoli, then not a music 
hall, but a restaurant. He ordered the biggest 
fowl in the house to be grilled according to some 
peculiar fashion he detailed to the cook, and a bottle 
of whisky. I ate a fair portion of the fowl, and 
accounted for two moderate doses of the spirit. 
He quietly and unostentatiously disposed of the 
remainder, and we went to the Greenroom Club, 
where, in an absent-minded sort of way in the 
intervals of conversation, he took a light dessert, 
consisting of the major part of a small Stilton 
cheese, a basket of pulled bread, and a glassful of 
celery, washed down with more whisky. No 
amount of alcohol seemed ever in the least to 
disconcert him, and long spells of toil which would 
have utterly exhausted others left him fresh and 
fit. Perhaps, had he been more akin to other men 
in the articles of nerve and driving-force, he might 
have had a longer career — a fuller one would have 
been hardly possible. He ran till he dropped, and 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 231 

there is a sad, pathetic ring in the memory of the 
last words he ever spoke : ** Let no one wake me 
— I want a good long sleep." It is hard to imagine 
that glowing spark from the great central incandes- 
cence quenched in the cold darkness of death. If, 
some day passing the familiar portals of the theatre 
he ruled, I should find him standing there, his hat 
at the old angle, his feet apart, his bright eye 
beaming its old, cheery, friendly defiance of all 
created things, ** I should not feel it to be strange." 

To return to A Society Butterfly. Buchanan 
was, in sporting parlance, "going for the gloves," 
and was determined to give adverse fortune 
no chances. Few pieces produced by a scratch 
management have been better cast. Beside Mrs. 
Langtry, our company comprised that admirable 
actor, the late William Herbert ; Miss Rose Leclerq, 
the Dugazon of her country and generation, quite 
the best aristocratic old woman I have ever seen 
on the English boards; Mr. Fred Kerr, who had 
already won the place he has since retained in the 
affections of the London public ; poor Edward 
Rose, a quaint comedian, a graceful jester, and 
a thoroughly good and lovable fellow, whose all- 
too-early death was at once a loss to the stage and 
to the drama ; and Mr. Allan Beaumont, then an 
excellent "old man," and now a Professor of 
Elocution at the Guildhall. All were happy in 
their parts, and all worked with right good will, 
although in that particular the palm must be 
awarded to Mrs. Langtry, who had not only to 
acquire the words and the business of the leading 



232 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

part, but also to study a '* Butterfly Dance " 
specially arranged for her by Mr. Willie Ward. It 
would be an exaggeration of flattery to say that 
Mrs. Langtry, as we know her, is actually a great 
actress, but since my experience with her on the 
stage of the Op6ra Comique, I have had a con- 
viction that she has missed the highest distinction 
in her adopted profession only because she came to 
its practice too late in life. Had she begun her 
professional career ten, or even half a dozen years 
earlier, at a period when her personality was less 
fixed and more malleable, she might have made a 
truly great artist. She possesses in a high degree 
the sentiment of the boards, and she has a gift 
Providence is not too fond of bestowing upon 
women of unusual physical beauty — the gift of 
brains. I cannot acquit the beautiful lady of her 
share in our disaster, but that makes it only the 
more imperative that I should give her the meed 
she fairly earned, and no chorus girl on her pro- 
motion could have been more willing, more patient, 
more eager to give all possible satisfaction to the 
management than was Mrs. Langtry. And in one 
particular she acted with a rare generosity, for 
which both Buchanan and myself were deeply 
grateful. She insisted on taking from our shoulders 
the financial burden of dressing her for her part, 
and the series of Parisian " creations " in which 
she appeared would certainly have strained our 
modest resources. And here we made one mistake 
— a mistake so foolish that it will remain inexplic- 
able to me until I die how we could have made it — 
we insisted on providing the " butterfly dress " in 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 233 

which she was to perform her dance. That mistake 
resulted in the ruin of our hopes. The butterfly 
dress arrived a night or two before the evening we 
had advertised for production, and at the first sight 
of it Mrs. Langtry refused, point-blank and abso- 
lutely, to appear in it. And here the syndicate 
came in and clinched our ruin. A postponement 
of a day or two would have given Mrs. Langtry 
time to slip across to Paris, to select a dress suited 
to her own taste, and so to appear in the dance, 
which was, as I have said, the very hub of our 
piece. But the syndicate raised a despairing wail 
about the folly, the madness, of " disappointing the 
public." Buchanan and I pointed out to them that 
their fear was based on what is perhaps the hollowest 
of all the innumerable silly superstitions which 
beset — and besot — the managerial mind ; that the 
public was profoundly indifferent whether or not 
A Society Butterfly was ever played at all ; that 
all that that section of the public which would be 
present on the first night — whenever that might 
be — would care about, was whether the piece then 
presented interested or failed to interest them. 
But our logic was vain. They held us to the letter 
of our agreement — we had advertised to open on a 
certain night, and open we must. Without the 
dress, the dance was meaningless, and had to go 
by the board ; so in hot haste we set to work to 
devise a series of " living pictures," in the last of 
which Mrs. Langtry was to appear as " Lady 
Godiva " about to mount for her solitary progress 
through Coventry. 

The great night arrived, and the house was 



234 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

packed with an audience which may fairly be 
described as distinofuished. The two first acts 
went magnificently, and I have seldom seen an 
audience on better terms with itself and its enter- 
tainers. Mrs. Langtry's appearance in the third 
act was the signal for a genuine ovation. She had 
reserved the most beautiful of her dresses for that 
scene, and the now historic jewels, afterwards so 
cleverly stolen from the custody of her bankers, 
were all displayed. She must have been pawnable 
as she stood for at least five-and-twenty thousand 
pounds. The act proceeded prosperously until it 
arrived at the tableaux vivants, of which the first 
two or three were mere ** bread - and - butter " 
arrangements, intended only to usher in the great 
effect of our leading lady's appearance as " Lady 
Godiva." The tableaux were shown on a mimic 
stage built over the real one, and composed mainly 
of a huge sheet of thick plate-glass, beneath which 
had been arranged four powerful limelights. These 
were supplemented by four others in the flies, and 
by yet four more in the wings, the intention being 
to create the illusion of a figure poised in mid-air in 
an atmosphere of blinding light. As, however, the 
only lime which acted was a blue one, which fell on 
the back of Mrs. Langtry's head and converted it 
into the semblance of a bowl of snap-dragon, the 
intention passed unrealised. In a theatrical ex- 
perience of thirty years I have never seen so 
sudden a change come over the spirit of an 
audience. The house, which five minutes earlier 
had been rippling with laughter and echoing with 
applause, instantaneously became a pandemonium 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 235 

compared with which the parrot-house at the Zoo, 
or the House of Commons on an Irish field night 
in the palmiest days of the Parnellite regime^ would 
have seemed a haunt of dull tranquillity. 

It was a nasty knock, and I have seldom 
enjoyed myself less than during the hour I spent 
next morning in skimming the notices in the daily 
papers. Buchanan was acutely hated by a good 
many pressmen, and what little sentiment existed 
amongst them regarding myself was not entirely 
friendly. The incidents which arose out of one of 
the notices can now only be touched upon with 
reserve, since the person who wrote it is dead. 
He was a person of importance in his day — or 
rather, to speak more justly, the journal for which 
he wrote was important — and what he had to say 
was so obviously spiteful and so flagrantly unjust 
that Buchanan and I determined publicly to 
resent it. This we did by appearing before the 
curtain after the second act on the following night. 
Buchanan read the notice to the audience, and 
proceeded to a plain, unvarnished statement of his 
opinion of the writer ; I following with a few brief 
words of endorsement. The house, delighted, as 
any chance assembly of people always will be, by 
such a manifestation of the fighting spirit, cheered 
uproariously. Buchanan was in fine comminatory 
form that night, and I thought — and think — 
that no honest man with a grain of pluck could 
have sat quiet under so tremendous an insult so 
publicly inflicted. But the journalist in question 
did not happen to be conspicuous either for honesty 
or for courage, and there was no fight. 



236 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

A bad first-night reception does not necessarily 
spell death to a theatrical venture, and A Society 
Butterfly played for seven weeks to houses each 
one of which held rather more money than its 
predecessor — the most encouraging symptom a 
struggling entertainment can show. We had 
touched paying business, and the receipts were 
still mounting, when we made our second and 
fatal mistake in our diplomatic relations with our 
principal star. After the second night the butterfly 
dance had been performed by a clever lady who 
bore a marked physical resemblance to Mrs. 
Langtry, a likeness so increased by a mere dash 
of make-up that a good many people not intimately 
acquainted with the latter lady's personal appear- 
ance accepted her as Mrs. Langtry in person. But 
the majority of the public was, of course, better 
informed. While Mrs. Langtry refrained from per- 
forming the dance the piece was practically mean- 
ingless, and we did our best to persuade her to 
perform that part of her contract, but in vain. The 
piece, she declared, was " doing well enough as 
it was." A little patience and diplomacy might 
have accommodated everything, but here again the 
syndicate was peremptory, and we had to offer 
Mrs. Langtry the alternative — dance or go. She 
went, and, with an understudy in her part the 
receipts fell practically to nothing, and within 
another week the " Butterfly " had fluttered its last. 

The ruin of the piece was made inevitable by 
what was perhaps the most galling accident I 
remember in a not too fortunate career. Buchanan 
and I went down to Lingfield one afternoon 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 237 

specially to back a horse named Theseus, about 
which we had received private information we 
thought too valuable to be neglected. We moored 
the brougham rather far down on the carriage 
line, and stayed with it, so as to keep away from 
the excitement of the ring, and avoid temptations 
to fritter away our capital — £ioo — on bets on 
earlier events, Theseus being booked for the fourth 
race. We had reckoned on the horses parading 
as usual before the stands, instead of which they 
passed round by the other end of the oval to the 
starting-place, and the first intimation we had of 
their presence in the field was the roar which 
announced their start for the race. 1 set out on 
a desperate run for the ring, and reached the gate 
in time to see the horse we should have backed 
cantering home with a disdainful ease. He had 
started at 20 to i, and we had missed ;^2000 — a 
sum which would have enabled us to defy the 
syndicate and follow our own course of action. I 
have to confess that I raged exceedingly, but 
Buchanan took the contretemps as he accepted 
every other misfortune I ever saw him undergo, 
with unruffled tranquillity. 

My collaboration in A Society Butterfly was 
not actually my first appearance as a dramatist. A 
year or two previously I had gone on tour with 
Christie in his New Zealand melodrama, Ned's 
Chum, doubling two small parts in the second and 
third acts, and he had produced a curtain raiser 
from my pen, founded at the suggestion of Mr. 
George R. Sims on a short story I had contributed 
to the Dispatch. For some years I had made the 



238 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

writing of drama my ultimate objective, and to 
that end had taken an infinity of pains to conquer 
the technique of the stage. I must have seen at 
least a couple of thousand plays during my time 
as dramatic critic of various papers ; I had watched 
the rehearsals of dozens, whenever I could persuade 
a good-natured manager to permit me the privilege, 
and I had read hundreds, principally of French 
manufacture. And when I say **read," I do not 
mean "skimmed." I read them, so to speak, with 
a microscope, intent on absorbing the secret of 
each writer's mastery of the boards. Alone and 
in collaboration I am the author of seventeen 
pieces, of which four have seen the light, and on 
others of which I have received various sums of 
money in consideration of a right to produce which 
has never been exercised. The luck which pursued 
me during my literary career was also my faithful 
attendant in my dramatic ventures. I have now and 
for some time past accepted it in the same acqui- 
escent spirit, and do not think it likely that I 
shall ever again attempt to storm the theatrical 
citadel. The lure which attracts most literary men 
to the stage is, of course, the money that may be 
made there. It is certainly the Tom Tiddler's 
Ground of the fortunate few who succeed in 
pleasing the managers first and the public after- 
wards. But money is, of all the really important 
things of which life is made, to me the least 
attractive and the least interesting, and the dis- 
agreeables connected with the pursuit of stage- 
success are, of all others, the least tolerable to a 
man of my temper and habits. 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 239 

The stage-door is the Frontier of No Man's 
Land. It is the nearest possible occidental equi- 
valent of that ** somewhere east o' Suez " for which 
Mr. Kipling's hero so passionately longed, where 
there ain't no Ten Commandments. If it have 
any laws of its own, if its apparent chaos is really 
resolvable to any sort of rule or order, my acquaint- 
ance with it — for a pretty long period a fairly close 
acquaintance — was insufficient to reveal them to me. 
Outside the theatre, the actor nowadays is quite 
like any other kind of man. He has, in greater 
or lesser revenue, the virtues and vices, the 
strengths and weaknesses, common to humankind. 
His emotions, his tendencies, his views of things, 
are ordinary, orderly, and calculable. But, when 
once his foot has crossed that mystic threshold, 
a change comes over him. His moral and mental 
diapason alters its pitch, he looks on things from 
a new and bewildering view-point. Beyond the 
stage-door east ceases to be east, or west, west ; 
the world in which the actor's inner being moves 
becomes to the outsider as deceptive and unreal 
as are the lath-and-canvas perspectives among 
which he walks. He does astounding things. I 
have known him at midday declare that a certain 
drama was the masterpiece of its century, that 
the one ambition of his life was to create its leading 
character; we have settled together the terms on 
which he would produce it and the principal items 
of its cast ; and six hours later I have returned 
home to find the script of that same drama, neatly 
done up in a brown paper parcel, awaiting me on 
my desk, without one word of explanation. I have 



240 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

been summoned in hot haste to a theatre by a 
telegram from the manager, and on my presence 
at the stage-door being announced, I have been 
informed that the manager was too busy to see 
me, but that, if I would state the object of my 
visit, he would write to me. I have been told by 
a manager that I did not possess, and by the 
direct ordinance of the Almighty could never hope 
to attain, the first faint glimmering idea of the 
dramatic art, and I have within a week of that 
utterance been employed by that self-same manager 
to revise the work of a veteran dramatist of many 
years' standing. Here be facts. And I am not 
adducing these facts as proofs of my claim to 
be regarded as the unluckiest of scribblers. They 
could be parallelled out of the experience of scores 
of other aspirants to stage honours ; they are quite 
ordinary adventures, characteristic merely of the 
queer atmosphere in which all things theatrical are 
steeped. 

That the manager — actor-manager or other — is 
almost invariably densely ignorant of the value of 
the goods in which he deals, might almost be 
allowed to go without saying. That statement is 
just as true of him as of every other sort of intel- 
lectual middle-man, the publisher, literary or musical, 
the picture-dealer, and the rest of the entire genus. 
It seems to be an eternal and immutable law that, 
directly a man begins to deal in the brains of other 
men, Providence deprives him of his own. If you 
asked the average intelligent man in the street 
how Mr. Pinero, or Mr. Barrie, or Mr. Bernard 
Shaw got upon the stage, he would tell you that it 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 241 

is because they are men of distinguished capacity in 
the practice of the dramatic art. But that is not 
so. That Mr. Pinero has great natural gifts as a 
dramatist, that he is a born constructor, that he has 
a keen eye for traits of modern character, a great 
stock of verbal wit, a marked faculty for inventing 
telling situations, is true. That Mr. Barrie possesses 
similar gifts, plus a most exquisitely poetic sense of 
the infinite oddity, tenderness, and quaintness of 
the life about him, is true. That Mr. Shaw possesses 
an intellectual searchlight which goes like a Rontgen- 
ray through layer under layer of conventional trap- 
pings to the very bone of human nature, that he is 
the most truly individual and personal writer in 
England, and can express his wit and wisdom in 
strings of epigram unmatchable outside the pages 
of Voltaire, is true. These are the gifts which keep 
these men on the stage, but they had nothing what- 
ever to do with getting them there. They stumbled 
on to the stage, precisely as Smith and Brown 
and Noakes and Stokes and Styles and Thompson, 
whose pieces are played to a crowd of clamorous 
deadheads on their opening nights and to empty 
benches for the rest of a fortnight's run, stumble on 
to it ; but, being the men of talent they are, they keep 
there, because the public recognise their talent and 
want more and more of their work. If one of these 
gentlemen were to write a piece more brilliant than 
the best he has yet produced and to send it on its 
rounds among the managers either anonymously or 
under a feigned signature, it would have no better 
chance of production than any other bundle of type- 
written matter delivered at the stage-door by the 

R 



242 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

postman. Have I any need to produce proof of this 
allegation ? Certainly not to any reader acquainted 
with theatrical history, but as I am writing for the 
general public and not merely for experts, I will jot 
down, almost at hazard, a few examples to illustrate 
it. When Mr. J. P. Burnett produced Jo at the 
Globe theatre thirty-five years ago, he offered on the 
night of production, before the curtain rose, to sell 
one-half of the entire rights of the piece for £^o cash, 
and the experienced manager to whom he made the 
proposal replied that he would not give him fifty 
pence for them. Three hours later the latter offered 
^2000, and was laughed at for his pains. With 
that admirable actress. Miss Jennie Lee, in the title 
part, Jo ran to record business in pretty nearly 
every country of the globe in which the English 
language is understood, and its success took more 
than five-and-twenty years to exhaust. I was present 
when Joseph Derrick offered the rights of Confusion^ 
stock, lock, and barrel, for £10 to another manager. 
The offer was rejected. A week or two later, the 
piece was produced at a matinee at the Vaudeville, 
transferred at once to the evening bill, and ran for 
close on a year. Everybody — that is, everybody 
in the theatrical world — knows the pre-production 
histories of Dorothy and of Charley's Aunt. Every- 
body knows through what rejections, rebuffs, priva- 
tions and hopes deferred Tom Robertson struggled 
to his all-too-brief enjoyment of recognition and 
success. Everybody knows how the plays of Mr. 
Somerset Maugham, which are now coining money 
in London, in the provinces, and in America and 
Australia, were hawked from hand to hand. It is 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 243 

my fixed belief that Messrs. Pinero, Barrie, Shaw, 
Maugham, and the rest of the admirably accom- 
plished band of our living dramatists, might have 
died of hunger on the streets with their dramas in 
their pockets, had they had no other means of gain- 
ing their daily bread ; that they owe their success 
wholly and solely to the intelligence of the public ; 
and that the production of their initial successes 
was as fortuitous as the spin of a coin or the roll of 
the marble in the roulette- wheel. Fate has been 
doubly kind to them — it first gave them their brains, 
and then directed the fluke by which they were 
enabled to exhibit them. 

To come down to the bed-rock of fact, the actor 
is not, in the vast majority of cases, at all a clever 
man. Outside the particular faculties which fit him 
for the practice of his art he is, pretty generally, 
merely averagely intelligent, and in respect of general 
culture he ranks lower than any other class of artist. 
An actor who reads anything more intellectually 
stimulating than the daily newspaper or the trashiest 
kind of fiction, or who can sustain his part in general 
conversation among intellectual people, is a rarity 
in my experience. Here are one or two cases in 
point, which I could supplement to almost any 
extent. Some years ago a piece was produced at 
a certain West- End theatre, of which the action was 
supposed to take place in the reign of George I. 
The manager, who played the juvenile lead, had, 
accidentally — as it afterwards appeared — made up so 
precisely like Joseph Addison that it seemed almost 
as if the portrait of the great essayist had walked 
out of its frame in Holland House to appear upon 



244 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

the stage. During an interval I went round to his 
dressing-room, and in the course of our conversa- 
tion referred to this circumstance. " Addison," said 
my friend, "who was he?" "Addison of the 
Spectator" I explained. " I didn't know the 
Spectator was so old as that," said the manager. 
He thought I was referring to the contemporary 
critical weekly. I left the impression uncorrected, 
and talked of other things. Then occurred another 
quaint little incident. One of the young ladies in 
the company was sending round a " birthday album " 
— a volume containing a space for each day of the 
year, in which the friends of the owner might write 
their names and any " sentiment " or reflection that 
occurred to them. It was brought to my friend the 
manager open at the page containing the last con- 
tribution, that of the low comedian of the company, 
who, below his signature, had written, " An actor is a 
person who paints his nose and says he is somebody 
else." The manager, who was a great stickler for 
the dignity of the profession, was exceedingly angry 
at this. " Here, Murray," said he, " you're a literary 
man. Tell me something I can say in answer." 
*' Let's give him a dose of Schlegel," I suggested. 
" Who the devil's he ? " asked the manager. I 
explained that he wasn't anybody at present, having 
had the fortune — good or bad — to retire from this 
shifting scene some seventy years before, but that 
he had been a German philosopher and critic with 
a high appreciation of the functions of the drama. 
"Well, what did he say.?" "He said, 'The 
theatre is the meeting-place of all the arts and all 
the philosophies.'" "That's devilish good!" said 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 245 

the manager. " Thanks. I'll write that." He sat 
at his table, and a minute after looked up and asked, 
" How do you spell * philosophies ? '" A moment 
later he got his call to the stage, and he had hardly 
obeyed it when the peccant low comedian entered 
the room. I showed him what the manager had 
written. " That's yoti'^' said the low comedian. "I'll 

swear that never heard of Schlegel in his life. 

Give me a pen." And beneath the manager's 
quotation he wrote, "Yes — but they meet in front 
of the curtain^' after which, his work on the stage 
being over for the night, he left the theatre. Per- 
haps he was wise in doing so, for the manager 
was a short-tempered person and a strong man of 
his hands. A great actress — I use the adjective 
advisedly, for I have seen few with a more delicate 
or convincing gift for the presentation of human 
emotion — once confided to me that she had never 
either seen or read the last act of one of Shake- 
speare's pieces, in the earlier scenes of which she 
had, an hour previously, drawn from me tears of 
sympathy, and had only the vaguest idea of how it 
ended. When, years ago, I went on tour with Miss 
Jennie Lee's Jo company. Miss Lee herself, her 
husband — the adaptor of the piece — and a young 
lady who played the part of " Esther Summerson " 
were the only persons in the crowd who had read 
the novel on which the play is based. 

The conditions of the actor's life are so little calcu- 
lated either to sharpen or to broaden his intelligence 
that one can hardly imagine a generally intellectual 
man enduring them for long together. To get by 
heart a certain number of words, to speak those words 



246 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

in tones and accents prescribed by another person, 
and to repeat them and certain mechanical gestures 
— also learnt by rote — for a hundred, or five hundred, 
or, it* may be, for five thousand nights in succession, 
is a stultifying process. The individual actors who 
have given proof of any distinguishing talent out- 
side of the practice of the mere technique of the art 
by which they live can be counted on the fingers of 
one hand. With one or two notable exceptions 
they fail hopelessly where they might be supposed 
to find their best chance of success — in the writing 
of drama. Now and then one hears of an actor 
who writes, or paints, or models, or composes, and 
does it as well as the run of amateurs ; but such 
cases are extremely rare. When an actor excels in 
any art outside his own it is generally as a per- 
former on some musical instrument, an excellence 
requiring a talent cognate to his talent as an actor 
— as an exponent of the ideas and moods of other 
people. And these cases, insignificant as they are, 
are only the exceptions which prove the rule. 

A man will, of course, be the better actor for 
possessing brains, but brains are no actual essentials 
of his outfit. Gifted with a handsome face, a trim 
figure, and the accent of a gentleman, he can play 
Romeo or Charles Surface to universal admiration, 
if coached by a stage-manager conversant with the 
business of the part. Endowed with a face like a 
gargoyle and a voice like a fog-siren, he can make an 
audience shudder over the brute malice of Caliban or 
laugh itself hoarse over the stupidities of Launcelot 
Gobbo, with only the faintest intellectual under- 
standing of the character he pourtrays, or with none 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 247 

at all. Physique is, indeed, nearly everything to 
the actor. The intellect of Shakespeare and the 
soul of Bayard, concealed in the fleshly envelope of 
the late Mr. Toole, or the living Mr. Penley, would 
fail to make them acceptable to an audience as 
" Hamlet " or " Othello." Phelps was a far more in- 
telligent man, and a far better actor, than Stephen 
Kemble ; but Kemble drew money as " Falstaff," 
because he had a big paunch and a naturally comic 
personality, and Phelps played the part to a hand- 
ful of deadheads, because nature had stinted him in 
those respects. The rapid increase nowadays in 
the number of theatres renders an increase in the 
number of actors a necessity, and to-day scores of 
young fellows go on the stage, as, were that course 
not open to them, they would go into a City office 
or behind a retail counter, with no vocation and no 
enthusiasm, and with no education which would not 
better fit them to sell butter or calico than to inter- 
pret human thought and emotion. They are no more 
" artistic " by nature than the average shopwalker 
or the average clerk, and in general intelligence 
they are decidedly below the run of mechanics. To 
say that all actors answer to this description would 
be obviously false, but to say that it correctly fits 
ninety per cent, among them is rather an under- 
statement than an exaggeration of the case. And, 
just as every conscript of the Grande Armee carried 
a shadowy Marshal's baton in his knapsack, so 
every member of this intellectually ragged regiment 
has it among his chances that he may one day 
become the lessee of a London theatre. It is from 
among their ranks that the lucky few who attain to 



248 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

that eminence are drawn. And he would be a bold 
man who would declare that those happy individuals 
are always superior in general intelligence, or even 
in histrionic capacity, to the mass of their brother 
actors. 

The process by which the actor is converted into 
the actor manager is simplicity itself. He serves 
his apprenticeship in London or the provinces, or 
both. As he gains in aplomb and technical skill he 
is entrusted with more and more prominent parts. 
At last Fate furnishes him with a part in which he 
makes a decisive score. The critics write about 
him, the illustrated papers publish his portrait, he 
is interviewed, talked about. He probably dresses 
well, and is socially presentable; he belongs, very 
likely, to a well-to-do family, or has wealthy con- 
nections ; or, at those wonderful social menageries, 
the " smart " clubs, he has met and fraternised with 
the class of man who finds most of the money spent 
in theatrical speculation — gilded votaries of pleasure, 
young, middle-aged, and old, stockbrokers, company- 
promoters, and so on. He possesses, or " knows 
of" a play which contains a splendid part, a part 
which might have been written for him — a piece 
with barrels of money in it. He talks about it to 
his wealthy friends, and they catch enough of his 
enthusiasm to subscribe the necessary one or two 
thousand pounds for its production. It is produced, 
and one of two things happens. It fails more or 
less ignominiously, and the would-be manager falls 
back, for a period at least, among the smaller 
celebrities of the profession. Or it succeeds, makes 
a lot of money, and establishes the young actor as the 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 249 

permanent manager of a theatre, and, ex-officio, as a 
judge of that form of literature which should be the 
highest and greatest, and is frequently, partly as a 
result of his influence, the most worthless and puerile. 
The manager simple, who is not and never has 
been an actor, is a more wonderful product still, 
and only less worthy of study because, of late years, 
he has grown to be so rare. He is purely and 
simply a tradesman, and for the most part would 
not for a moment pretend to be anything else or 
anything more. He runs his theatre as his brother 
tradesmen run their shops, with the difference — 
rather an important difference when you come to 
think of it — that he is absolutely incapable of 
judging of the quality of the goods he sells. On 
many points of his business he is an expert. He 
knows what rent his landlord can fairly demand for 
his theatre. He knows how many supers it will 
take properly to "dress" his stage, the cost of 
properties and accessories, the holding capacity of 
his house, the amount of printing and advertisement 
necessary to draw attention to the show. His 
leading man would try in vain to bluff him out of 
an extra ten pounds a week, clever indeed would 
be the gallery check-taker who could long continue 
to cheat him of a tithe of that amount. He may 
be, in addition, an excellent stage-manager, with a 
keen eye for grouping and effect. You may add as 
many other qualifications as you can think of, but 
they are all rendered nugatory by the one fact that, 
like his friendly rival the actor-manager, he has 
neither the artistic sympathy nor the critical judg- 
ment to tell a good play from a bad one. 



250 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

Ignorance is the mother of superstition, and the 
statement is just as true in the visible and tangible 
world as in the shadowy domain of the unseen. 
The manager cannot deny — he would pretty cer- 
tainly do so if he could manage it with any decent 
chance of being believed — that in theatrical specu- 
lation failure is the rule and success the exception. 
He must perforce find some explanation for so 
patent a fact. The very simple — and perfectly 
true — explanation, that he is, in the vast majority 
of cases, a duffer and an ignoramus in the most 
important department of his own business has pro- 
bably never occurred to him. In my thirty years of 
theatrical experience I have never once heard a 
manager explain a failure — of his own production — 
as due to a fault of his own judgment. Successive 
generations of managers have invented, bequeathed, 
and augmented a long list of feeble and futile 
superstitions regarding the causes of theatrical 
success and theatrical failure, superstitions which 
have passed so long unchallenged that they have 
hardened into the consistency of dogma. Here is 
a single instance, the type of many. Some years 
ago a certain manager of my acquaintance produced 
an (alleged) comic opera at a West-End theatre. 
It was beautifully dressed, faultlessly rehearsed, 
there was a crowd of popular artists in the cast, 
and the music was played by an admirable orchestra, 
admirably conducted. But there its virtues ended. 
Among many nights of boredom and disgust that 
night stands out in my remembrance. The book 
of the opera was a mountainous ineptitude. The 
scansion and the rhymes of its lyrics would have 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 251 

attracted contemptuous notice in a collection of 
Catnach ballads. Its dialogue was pointless, vulgar 
drivel. It had no plot. Hisses were heard in the 
pit and catcalls in the gallery before the curtain 
had been up ten minutes, and they grew in a steady 
crescendo until the final fall of the curtain. A day 
or two later I met the manager, and he confided to 
me his theory of the damnation of the piece. It 
was the result of admitting the paying public on a 
first night. The opera was the best thing of its 
sort he had ever known in his experience, a gem of 
dramatic and musical art, and if he had only made 
certain of a favourable first-night verdict by con- 
fining admission to the personal friends of the 
author, the composer, the artists, and the manage- 
ment, it would have been a perfect gold-mine. 
The man who said this amazing thing was neither 
an escaped lunatic nor an inexperienced amateur. 
He had had years of theatrical experience, and tens 
of thousands of pounds had passed through his 
hands. And if the work he produced, and the 
excuse he urged for its failure, have remained all 
these years in my memory, it is only because they 
differed slightly in degree, and not at all in kind, 
from dozens of other examples of managerial 
imbecility. 

Mr. Midshipman Easy, it will be remembered, 
went to sea in the hope of finding on the ocean 
that spirit of equality he had failed to find on land. 
It was in no similar delusion, that I might discover 
among theatrical managers an intellectuality indis- 
coverable among the publishing fraternity, that I 
left the concoction of novels for the manufacture of 



252 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

drama — I already knew enough of the theatre to 
cherish no such dream. It was rather in the spirit 
which might have actuated some unlucky gentleman 
in the grip of the Inquisition, who, finding the 
monotony of the Scavenger's Daughter or the 
thumbscrew getting on his nerves, might have 
elected to try the rack as a change. I should be 
sorry to discourage budding genius, but I do not 
recommend any young litterateur to try the theatre 
as his first avenue to success. An unknown man 
may get a play accepted by a responsible manage- 
ment, but the chances are all against him. There 
is no royal road to acceptance by managers, but 
the best introduction to them nowadays is to have 
one or two successful novels to your credit. None 
of my books had ever really hit the public between 
wind and water, and, as I have already said, the 
luck which had dogged my literary ventures followed 
me across the threshold of the theatres. And, as I 
have already intimated, to hawk about a novel 
among publishers, disagreeable as it is, is a summer 
holiday compared to hawking plays about among 
managers. Should I ever find myself condemned 
to choose between doing that again and selling 
matches in the street, I shall elect for the latter, as 
vastly more dignified. 

It occurred to me that I might perhaps find a 
private patron for my dramatic wares, and I entered 
on the search for him. But, like Falstaff — with 
a difference — I was not only unfortunate myself, 
but the cause of misfortune to others. The upas- 
like effect I exercised on the fortunes of certain 
publishers, as detailed earlier in these confessions, 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 253 

extended almost invariably to such unfortunates 
as showed any symptom of helping me to succeed 
in my stage career. The first was H. C, a genial 
young gentleman who ran some sort of business — 
what, I never knew — which justified the renting 
of a palatial set of rooms with a half-acre of 
plate-glass frontage on the first floor of a house 
in Regent Street. He acquired a two-years' right 
of production in a comedy of mine, and promptly 
went through the Bankruptcy Court. My period 
of mourning for him was terminated by the appear- 
ance on my horizon of a stock-broker who had 
realised I don't know how much money by a 
daring operation in some sort of South African 
values. He rescued the comedy from H. C, and 
was in the act of engaging a company and nego- 
tiating with a certain suburban theatre for a trial 
week when the Boer War broke out. The last 
time I met him he was carrying a brown paper 
parcel, which he told me contained his dress 
clothes, and he appealed to me, as a person learned 
in such matters, as to the best establishment at 
which to hypothecate them. 

Then J. W. " happened along," as the Americans 
say. J. W. was a remarkable person in more ways 
than one. To begin with, he was very much the 
biggest and heaviest man I have ever seen outside 
a booth, a Colossus who turned the scale at over 
thirty stone. He became possessed of the acting 
rights of a drama I had written in collaboration 
with Christie and Mr. John L. Shine. Within a 
few weeks of the completion of the bargain he was 
smitten with paralysis, and for nearly two years 



254 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

ceased to count in the list of the living. The huge 
man was reduced to the condition of a helpless 
baby ; he was washed and fed like one, and was 
oblivious of his nearest and dearest friends. A 
constitution as remarkable as his physique brought 
him through this terrible attack, and although he 
was condemned to walk on crutches, and was shrunk 
to a mere sketch and shadow of his former self, he 
regained his intellectual powers. Those powers 
were of no mean order, for after his recovery he 
invented a most ingenious secret process for the 
production of a substitute for a certain rare natural 
substance of great and rapidly increasing value, and, 
crippled as he was both physically and financially 
by his illness, succeeded in disposing of his patent 
in every civilised country in the world on such 
terms that he told me he felt positively frightened 
when he contemplated the extent of the fortune in 
his grasp. We took a strong mutual liking for 
each other. He asked to see some specimens of 
my individual dramatic work, and as a result 
promised me that he would, at the earliest possible 
moment, take a theatre and " run " me as a play- 
wright. One day as we were lunching together at 
his office, he said, *' I am going to Buenos Ayres 
next week, partly on business and partly for the 
sake of the voyage. I shall be away about eight 
weeks altogether. Make it an appointment to 
come here on the seventeenth of August, and we 
will settle things and get to work." I called on 
the appointed date, and found his secretary in the 

outer office. " Is Mr. W in ? " I asked. 

"In!" echoed the secretary. "Yes — he's in his 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 255 

coffin." He had fallen dead at his own table the 
previous evening. 

Perhaps the richest specimen of my peculiar 
brand of luck in things theatrical was furnished by 
a game of spoof played for my discomfiture by 
Providence d propos of a melodrama produced 
by the Messrs. Gatti at the Adelphi some twenty 
years ago. I was at that time acting as dramatic 
critic of a certain London weekly, and received 
from my editor the voucher for a stall for the first 
night of the piece in question. I forget what I did 
on that especial evening, but there was metal of 
some sort more attractive elsewhere, and I gave 
the stall to a friend on condition that he wrote the 
notice forme. Twelve years later, Richard Mansell 
— another good fellow whose handsome face and 
cheery voice I can never hope to see or hear 
again — introduced Christie and myself to a theatrical 
speculator who gave us a tentative commission to 
write a play, whose action was to take place in the 
Klondyke region, a country through which Christie 
had travelled a year or two earlier, and where, as 
all the world will remember, huge deposits of gold 
had been discovered. We were to draw up a 
complete synopsis of the piece, to write the first act, 
and to submit them for approval. If they were 
satisfactory we were to receive ^loo cash, and the 
same sum on the completion of the drama, " in 
advance of fees." Christie and I were both hard 
up, and we went for our task con amove, and com- 
pleted it within ten days of our receipt of the 
commission. Christie read the act to Mansell and 
his principal, and as he read I noticed a growing 



256 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

look of wonder on both faces, and a constant 
exchange between them of glances expressive of 
hopeless bepuzzlement. We had produced an 
actual replica of the first act of the melodrama 
I ought to have seen twelve years earlier. A 
Canadian farmer-family, reduced to the verge of 
ruin by a long battle with an ungrateful soil and 
a series of bad seasons, who had determined to 
throw up their farm and try their luck in newly 
discovered gold-fields ; a half-breed Spanish woman 
of vindictive temperament who had been cruelly 
tricked by a sham marriage ; a murder, witnessed 
by a low-comedy Cockney character ; and half a 
dozen minor figures and situations had all been 
faithfully reproduced from the older piece. The 
coincidence extended even to the name of our 
revengeful heroine, who in both dramas was 
christened " Quita." Both our auditors received 
our assurance of the purely accidental character of 
the resemblance with implicit faith — indeed, to 
doubt it would have been to stigmatise us, not as 
plagiarists, but as lunatics. 

Let me bring this somewhat monotonous record 
to an end. Some five years ago I wrote a five-act 
drama, freely adapted from a French original. 
After hawking it about in the usual fashion among 
the managers, I submitted it to a young fellow 
with a taste for theatrical speculation, who offered 
me ;^5o for the entire British rights. I was — as 
my dramatic Macaenas was perfectly aware — so 
poor at the moment that I would have sold my 
teeth, which indeed were an almost superfluous 
possession, and I accepted his proffer. He did 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 257 

nothing with the piece, and a year ago, thinking 
that I saw a chance of placing it elsewhere, I 
applied to him for a copy to offer to a London 
management. But the piece had vanished. My 
original MS. and four type-written copies had 
disappeared into space. 

If I still cherished the faintest hope of success 
upon the stage, this public proclamation of myself 
as a dramatic Jonah would mark a depth of 
business ineptitude to which even my father's son 
might blush to sink. But I have said a last and 
long farewell to any such hopes, and so my avowal 
cannot hurt me. 

Readers of " Monte Christo " will remember 
the delightfully pious reason given by the Abbe 
Faria for renouncing his attempt to escape from 
the Chateau d'If. Finding that he has a hundred 
yards of living rock to tunnel through, and no 
instrument but a toothpick with which to perform 
the operation, he concludes that his desire for 
liberty is contrary to the Divine Will. In a simi- 
larly devout frame of mind I finally relinquished 
my dream of dramatic fame. 

It had been my intention, on reaching the end 
of this book, to round it off in proper orthodox 
fashion, with a flourishing peroration expressing 
my philosophy of life, and conveying a store of 
moral counsel to my readers. But now that the 
end is here, I do not feel in the least degree like 
doing it. So far as moral counsel is concerned, 
anybody who yearns for that may acquire a vast 
deal more of it than he is ever likely to translate 

s 



258 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 

into practice by investing a penny in the purchase 
of a child's copybook. And as regards a philosophy 
of life, I make, on self-examination, the amazing 
discovery that I haven't any. Two years ago I 
could have labelled myself quite easily as a point- 
blank fatalist and pessimist. A fatalist I still am ; 
I don't see how anybody who looks the facts of 
existence squarely in the face can be anything else. 
I came into the world by no motion of my own, 
the mathematically accurate result of preceding 
forces, and my original plasm has been shaped 
and moulded, developed, distorted, fed or starved, 
by an infinite plexus of circumstance with whose 
ordering I have had extremely little to do. I am 
also — academically — still a pessimist, inasmuch as 
it is my sincere conviction, based on such observa- 
tion of the cosmos as I have been able to make, 
that the mass of pain exceeds the mass of pleasure ; 
that neither the individual nor the race has any 
ultimate objective ; and that the evolution of con- 
sciousness was a colossal blunder of some vast force 
outside the scope of human understanding. But 
I have no inclination to enlarge on those views at 
this moment. 

The publication of this book will roughly coincide 
with the second anniversary of my wedding-day — 
the day on which I performed the only completely 
sensible and the only truly fortunate act of an other- 
wise quite curiously muddle-headed and, till then, 
conspicuously unfortunate existence. And my pre- 
sent, actual, workaday philosophy consists in enjoy- 
ing the abundant harvest of happiness which has, 
by some paradox well-nigh as bewildering as it is 



A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 259 

delightful, sprung up in the little seed-plot in the 
field of time which I had sown so liberally with 
nothing but tares and brambles. With what I 
think is a wise egotism I have come to recognise 
that, out of joint as the world may be, I do not 
suffer under the cursed spite of having been born 
to put it right. A man who has arrived at fifty 
years of age with such faculties, physical and 
mental, as he ever possessed practically unimpaired, 
and whose immediate surroundings are tranquilly 
happy, may accept in all good faith and turn to 
sweet uses the bitter couplet of Dryden — 

" And from the dregs of life, hope to receive 
What the first sprightly running could not give." 

If I presented myself to you as the Stepson of 
Fortune, and have continued so long to masquerade 
under that name, it was only that I might more 
completely enjoy your friendly surprise in taking 
my final leave of you in my actual character of her 
kind, if capricious Ladyship's prodigal, repentant, 
and reinstated Son. 

London : March 27, 1909. 



THE END 



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